Poem: Lay Back the Darkness

My father in the night shuffling from room to room

on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream

and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman

who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold

of a vast night

without his walker or his cane

and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,

while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room

is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

But a boy standing on the edge of a forest

listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs,

to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poems, including “Gabriel: A Poem,” a book-length elegy, and five books of prose, most recently “A Poet’s Glossary.”  He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.