the person in the poem: an ode?

2 June 2026

Preamble, I guess: Before I share this poem, it may be helpful to know a few things. First, although this reads as an elegy, it is not. My father lives in upstate New York. He is a very active person, a civil engineer, but of late he has been unable to do some of the activities he once loved, as he is battling the most aggressive of cancerous brain tumors: glioblastoma. Luckily, he was a member of a very successful (for him) immunotherapy trial which you can read about in this article in New York Magazine. Yes, that beautiful face on the story’s cover is my father.

So although this poem is not elegiac, it certainly reminds me that I should perhaps give him a call later today.

Another brief note: I wrote this poem yesterday during my Monday writing group, “Write Right Write Now.” It has not been much edited.

Enjoy!

~Meg

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the person in the poem

In a character sketch I drafted today

of a mid-sixties something home inspector

I recognized unexpectedly my father.

Can we preserve someone dear for eternity

in a novel,

in the blink of a cursor,

in black Times New Roman on white parchment?

If I write of his ubiquitous Old Spice aftershave,

can you smell it?

If I paint a picture with words of his starched shirtsleeves,

can you see them?

If I show you how he pulls a pressed cotton hanky

from his pocket to blow his nose,

do you hear it?

And anyway, are these sensory experiences

the meat and mettle of the meticulous man

who hangs tools just so on precise pegs

aligned in straight lines along the ceiling rafters

of his basement workshop?

Or do they convey the something-more-than

wholeness of his embrace?

The softness of his speech?

The intensity of his sensitivity—

the way his brain turns his body into a projectile

at the weakest whiff of mold?

No; despite my faith in le mot juste,

there is no hope for the truth of memory

in story, nor elegy, nor ode.

The signifier never equals the signified.

Still.

When I write of the footfall of topsiders

along a rain-dampened dock,

something in me aligns at a cellular level

and something lost

—a time, a childhood, a place, a space, a man—

feels oh-so briefly regained.