Today is Halloween, and Monday is Day of the Dead. In celebration, this week’s poem, Katie Prior’s “The Close,” relates a daughter’s dream encounter with a father who has passed away. I love this poem’s vivid imagery, the very dream-like way it drifts between stanzas mid-phrase, and the unexpected insight it offers, finally, into the life of the dead.
Prior is a writer and recent graduate of the University of Southern Maine. She has worked with the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance to support young writers in Maine. Her poems have appeared in Collision Literary Magazine, Howling Press, Resurgam Magazine, Maine Women Magazine and other journals. She currently lives in Paris, France, where she reads, writes and listens.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
The Close
By Katie Prior
after Wendell Berry
Last night I had a dream
in which my father was alive.
He sauntered in with a fluidity unfamiliar
and foreign to my aging green
irises. I wanted to ask if he
had been eating fine, lambs-ear soft
peaches; if his fingers, last delicate, and
troublingly china white, have
pinkened, curling around a juniper
branch, sticky sweet with the botanicals
of gin; or if he minded that I took
the cheap watch from his wrist,
set still in daylight savings––that
terrible perversion of our sun’s
conscious decisions;
and if he had heard my sister
weeping at the close. Did he
hear the doctor, with his hand
on the doorknob, circle to finally say
Travel well, Robert. I couldn’t speak
a word, in the dream, my father
said, I am fissuring with
more curiosity than I have ever
known. I am learning about
myself now.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Close,” copyright © 2020 by Katie Prior, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.