Brick Books
Coldstream

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Radu, Kenneth

Letter to a Distant Father

1st ed.

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-32-7

I. Title.

PS8585.A29L48 1987 C811'.54 C87-094132-1

PR9199.3.R244L48 1987

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N6K 4G6
Canada

Letter to a Distant Father

for Diane

Contents

Letters

Upon a friend's entering a monastery

Orchard Poem

10 p.m.

daffodils in snow

The Bedroom

Sleepless Nights

Royal Women

Aschenputtel's Sisters

Sleep

The Road Taken

On the road

Wild Swan Shot Outside Montreal

Mountain of Gold

Narrenschiff

Letter to a Distant Father

Letters

I

Your letter arrived on a day drier
than a cactus needle. The sun is hard,
dropping light that burns grass and carrot tops.
The corn stalks are bent brown from lack of rain.
You lick ices on a cool terrazzo,
write about mosaics and romantic
ruins that Keats saw before he expired,
his name mercifully writ in water.
“Wish you were here. The frescoes are divine.
My feet have travelled the Appian Way.
The sky is the colour of poetry.”
I wish you were here. The heat's too heavy
to bear alone. My garden's parched, my bones
weary. The world is dust between my hands.

II

Travelling's easy for the young and rich.
Confident, washed in gold, aromatic,
they gather experiences like clothes,
changing them daily, mixing and matching;
pop off airplanes with their Italian
bags; glitter over white wine al fresco
and exchange stories about food in Rome.
Your world has no settled ground for standing,
so little room for anything to grow.
How white and stony that Grecian island
where you tripped over a fallen temple.
Remembering the gold chain I gave you,
I stand in my garden watching insects
eat pumpkin leaves. Consumption is rampant.

III

Tent caterpillars have camped in my trees,
a slow death from twig's end and leaf tip
unless I climb up with shears or blow torch.
Methods of killing demand some balance
and clear eyes for directing lines of fire,
extinction is a matter of choosing.
When your thoughts came from the Great Pyramid
after they floated a time on the Nile,
I was planning larvacide. You're moving
fast, insatiable for new leaves to turn.
The Egyptian air gives a transcendent
touch to your words. You find awe so quickly
on a camel's high back, free from blisters
and implacable marauders in trees.

IV

Not the hanging gardens of Babylon,
these scarlet runners thick on a trellis,
or squash vines curling over the garden
wall. Nor do my small chrysanthemums shame
the perfect blue roses in perfect beds
in the green geometry of Versailles.
I have not directed growth through the hands
of other workers nor bent down to dig