VOICES 4
Frank Anderson, M.D.Chance
I step down a staircase
In a house I do not know
And where stained panels
Give to a shaded turn
In the mind of a ghost
I hear the voice of a girl.
-If sunshine, broken in the window, shifts
To shadows in my skirt as I come down
The stairs to him, and if, as I come, he lifts
His eyes and speaks upon the turn,
Then I will marry this man-
Grandfather, physician
When you asked one afternoon
The hand of Lena Coffin
A voice I've never heard
Entered walls built this year
By my carpenter son
Gave a name to the eldest
And a thought to my third
Chanted lyrics in the ear
Of my one daughter
Sounds in words I have not guessed
Which are already waiting in the poem.
In a snapshot of my wedding
I am rounding the staircase
On my father's right arm
My face grave with fear
Of all the lives falling to ours
Assault of the centuries
Closing faster than we could hold
Around chambers of the possible
Around whatever shades and voices
Figured in descent of that stair.
As outside the poem
Beyond its truth and language
A readiness muses
All the poem can become
So gathered in our marriage
Presences who understood
The way that history takes
To slant its long light in new lives.
Grandfather, physician
I am, and these words are, a cast of shade
Upon a woman's dress as she came down.
You raised your eyes and spoke. Such chances made
This poem. It is your voice which lies within my own.