Mind’s Eye
Picture his face my therapist said. We were talking
about my late ex. Do you have him?
Yes, I said, but that yes was nine-tenths
a lie. His narrow head phased in, then out,
like a ghost who allows you just one glimpse.
I could summon his crooked nose, jutting chin
below his grin, but held them for mere seconds.
I couldn’t catch his love-filled eyes at all.
It’s the same with my father. His broad-browed face
flashes, then retreats, mouth left behind
like the Cheshire cat’s, but stern and straight,
lips pressed together against the censure
he’s about to issue. Then that, too, is gone.
Mother, sons, grandchildren, the Torrey pine
I wept in when I was a teen. The lupined meadow,
sky fire-burned muddy orange — all of them phantasms
that tease with too-brief, misty flickers.
But ask me to imagine the Prelude of Bach’s first cello suite
and every note from first to last cascades
through my head, sonorous and vibrant.
Or Joni’s “River” — I hear every sad syllable
and note. I can paint phrases that capture my man
veiled and leaning over a hive, ungloved hands
lifting frames aswarm with bees, finding the queen,
speaking honey to his girls. I mean to say
all these words whisper in me. This
is how I daydream.
PATRICIA ZYLIUS is the author of the chapbook Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, SWWIM, Plant-Human Quarterly, Quartet, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Crosswinds, Body, Gyroscope Review, Passager, Sequestrum, Book of Matches, Juniper, Gingerbread House, Willows Wept, and other journals, on the Women’s Voices for Change website, and in a few anthologies. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband. She practices tai chi, walks, putters, and gardens.
Read more by Patricia Zylius
Poem in B O D Y
Poem in Otherwise Collective
Two poems in Sequestrum
Poem in Gyroscope Review