Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Answer

• 102 answer The secret of the world is hidden in the world. —cLaude Lévi Str auSS After they have gone to bed my father’s low whimpers continuous with my mother’s talking to him, the sound indistinguishable, almost from the conversation I heard all my girlhood from the other bedroom, I feel my way down the dark hallway past them to the living room lit by the moon. “Is it quartered or full, Sharon Lura?” his last words to me tonight. It was the slightest sliver the last time he asked. Now it silvers the Siuslaw at high tide, the dunes on the other side like benevolent souls stretched out with their corpses. I watch the brisk visible wind recarve them. The gulls are still here beneath the window, hundreds blanketing the beach to the river’s northern turn. For two days they’ve been landing. They stand silent, unmoving except for a slow back and forth with the tide as if waiting. “Look now,” my father said, propped up. “They’ve all turned this way.” I do look. The lunar ray, a vibrating band, weds me and for the first time I know • 103 my middle name, moonlight from his mother. A flash, the sun’s corals and golds still held, the wind turns a pulse of light and mist like an immense sigh of exhalation and the cells of everything open slightly as if to show me the secret too pure, too silver and crystal to read but something of message, even meaning in my father’s agony, this suffering unto death ...