Resemblance

This poem was featured in the New Yorker a while back. I've been flirting with its truth(s) all month long. I miss my dad, everyday.

ResemblanceBy David Ferry

It was my father in that restaurant
On Central Avenue in Orange, New Jersey,
Where I stopped for lunch and a drink, after coming away
From visiting, after many years had passed,
The places to which I’d brought my father’s ashes
And the ashes of my mother, and where my father’s
Grandparents, parents, brothers had been buried,
And others of the family, all together.

The atmosphere was smoky, and there was a vague
Struggling transaction going on between
The bright day light of the busy street outside
And the somewhat dirty light of the unwashed
Ceiling globes of the restaurant I was in.
He was having lunch. I couldn’t see what he was having
But he seemed to be eating, maybe without
Noticing whatever it was he may have been eating;
He seemed to be listening to a conversation
With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back
From where they went to when they went away?
Or maybe those others weren’t speaking at all? Maybe
It was a dumbshow? Put on for my benefit?

It was the eerie persistence of his not
Seeming to recognize that I was there,
Watching him from my table across the room;
It was also the sense of his being included
In the conversation around him, and yet not,
Though this in life had been familiar to me,
No great change from what had been before,
Even in my sense that I, across the room,
Was excluded, which went along with my sense of him
When he was alive, that often he didn’t feel
Included in the scenes and talk around him,
And his isolation itself excluded others.

Where were we, in the restaurant that day?
Had I gone down into the world of the dead?
Were those other people really Shades of the Dead?
We expect that, if they came back, they would come back
To impart some knowledge of what it was they had learned.
Or if this was indeed Down There, they they,
Down there, would reveal, to us who visit them,
In a purified language some truth that in our condition
Of being alive we are unable to know.

Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us.

Unable to know is a condition I’ve lived in
All my life; it is a poverty
Of imagination about the life of another.
This is, I think, the case with everyone.
Is it because there is a silence that we
Are all of us forbidden to cross, not only
The silence that divides the dead from the living
But, antecedent to that, is it the silence
There is between the living and the living,
Unable to reach across that silence through
The baffling light there always is between us?
Among the living the body can do so sometimes,
But the mind, constricted, inhibited by its ancestral
Knowledge of final separation, holds back,
Unable to complete what it wanted to say.

What is your name that I can call you by?

Virgil said, when Eurydice died again,
“There was still so much to say” that had not been said
Even before her first death, from which he had vainly
Attempted, with his singing, to rescue her.