Souls Must Exist
- Souls Must Exist
Because a mourner changes places in synagogue,I move a few seats closer to the windowand watch the Atlantic doubling back,
like the prayers we repeat, morning, afternoon, and night.Souls must exist. Otherwise life would be too hard.After my father died, the two of us alone
in the hospice room, I asked him to forgive mefor all the times I failed him. I could barelysay it but needed to be heard and forgiven,
my mother waiting in the hallway to be driven home,the mirrors not yet covered in sheets,our pictures on the table, his face mine, mine, his. [End Page 127]
David Caplan has published six books of literary criticism and poetry, including most recently, his second poetry collection, Into My Garden. He is a contributing editor to Pleiades. The Charles M. Weis Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, Caplan twice served as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature and received the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry and an Individual Excellence Award in Criticism from the Ohio Arts Council. His current projects include American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and North Shore, a poetry collection.
