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ELEGY ON THE FAR BANK
- The Yale Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 104, Number 3, July 2016
- p. 70
- 10.1353/tyr.2016.0046
- Article
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7 0 Y E L E G Y O N T H E F A R B A N K D E B O R A G R E G E R His taxes done, the garden planted, my father didn’t wish to spend even one night in the hospital – then he laid his head back and drifted away from the doctor. For the first time in days he slept, better than he had for years. The coin in his mouth he surrendered to the ferryman, and crossed a river he’d never fished. What were we, his children, but overgrowth crowding the bank he’d left? Sand-bar willow, or Russian olive – hard to say without his glasses. My breath snagged on a fish hook. From the gasping lip of something I caught sixty years ago, he eased a barb. The rock he forbade me to throw in the water turned out to have a higher calling: deftly he clubbed a fish big enough to eat. Too small to keep? He loosed it in the shallows – just so, he’d taught me the dead man’s float. Had I sunk? Only if mind and body flailed. Catch. Catch and release. Breath held a word as long as it could. ...