Absence

My father, visiting me,
stands on the slope of my garden
with its view of the west and the evening light,
his cigarette smoke snaking up
then lost in the late wind
coming down from Twin Peaks
where the fog begins its slow creep.

With the fog
all that rests above us begins to fade:
houses, perched and improbable
all along the hill. Facades, trees,
the road that leads down to us.
I watch the wind at play in his hair,
in the folds of his loose shirt, a current
that examines and then leaves him.
His cigarette burns to its end. We stand

watching the slow, far wavering
of things disappearing from the world.

Originally appeared in Kyoto Journal, #62, 2006.

Jim Nawrocki’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, Kyoto Journal, Nimrod, Chroma Journal, and Mudfish, among others. It’s also been included in the anthologies, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).