Book of Days

                              for my father 
                              and in memory of John Fiorito

     You'd meet him
     in the wet seasons,

     raking leaves,
     pruning;    

     you compared
     fertilizer,  pondered    
     stocks--he'd come inside

     for a glass of wine, 
     some firelight. 

     One November
     he knew he wouldn't  see 
     Christmas:

     before the hospital,
     before the spasms,

     he kept 
     his body's counsel:   

     no pain, no inkling 
     of a god--he just felt

     his spleen shut, his 
     occiput shift.

     Then he could see you 
     alone in the nut-brown
     rack of your garden

     in March, 

     your head bowed 
     to the parched forsythia,  

     and he provided you

     a book of days

     to find
     under the evergreen 
     at Christmas--

     he had already
     written the card:

     he wanted you 
     to laugh every evening;

     he wanted you to grow
     even older.


     Christina Pugh
 	

     
     *         *          *
        

     about the poem:

     "The poem is an elegy for a friendship that was special to my father.  
     Some of the details are based on actual events, though my entering 
     into his friend John Fiorito's sentience and thoughts is clearly an 
     imaginative leap.  I think the verb 'provided' is essential to what 
     I was getting at here:  after John dies, he becomes a father figure 
     for my own father. Thus his gift, the book of days, is restorative, 
     even as the poem's lines remain harshly broken."



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