For My Father

Meditation

by Evelyn Hooven (October 2023)

Pierrot Tired, Guy Pène du Bois, 1929

The seemly, diligent stone with its list of beloveds didn’t close it for me. In some religions, the spirit of the one deceased wanders and seeks its own idiom of final rest.

For you, there was always a longing—not to be answered by offspring. Your life’s work? Your true love?

You liked several kinds of song—including Carmen’s lively Habañera. And another that you liked especially was a melancholy one. I learned to play it on the piano, though it wasn’t so much the melody as those words.

I walk along the streets of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams

Would you have spoken of them in that memoir you said you destroyed soon after you wrote it? Did you need to protect some privacy, a final solitude—better than exposure?

You weren’t a complainer.

And I can’t intrude.

Yet I wish there were some remedy … I send my love.

In the perils and mystery of your journey, will there be companions?

Will you accept rest?

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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