EDWARD NAVIN BURKE

(1923 -1995)
for Father's Day


Never blind to their light
but always reaching
for it,
the way garden flowers
lean to the sun to issue forth
progenies of design,
distinct chips of an
ironwood block shaping themselves
in the rooms you imagined.

Shaving in the bathroom
with the door open,
and singing
that you love Paris
in the winter
when it's snowing
although we lived
along Detroit freeways
thinking Westward and onward
until California was the place
where The Motor City drove us.

The lives you gave us
with the breaths you took,
our faces having divided
the b est of your features
in the children
that follows the best we've
been doing.

Somewhere in history
someone will always look like you.

Light comes into all the rooms
from all the sunshine
that covers the green mountains
like glowing shawls of rapture
that are the beaded notes
of the Paris you loved
and imagined,

you eyes blue as burnt ash
arranging the forms of the world
in new configurations
always, surprising as trick knees
and the lurch of love
that is bottomless
and full of a world.


I have your hair
but none of your combs,
I have your eyes
but none of your vision,
I am myself all of you in the making,
grey hair and trick knees.


We stand here where you brought us
in rooms that
are signed with your name,
you've done all the work
you had to.


Our shoulders are broad and we stand erect,
somewhere in history,
someone will
always look like you.

snap to it

the art on the wall
is not you at all
because the arms
on the canvas are too large
in proportion to your

waist and it’s a wonder
such a drawing and
charcoal rendering

would have eyes
on the same side of the
head viewing the world

like it were city scenes
spied while sitting sideways
on a seat on a train

that crawls through many
stops between here and Solana.


lend me your comb
and i’ll staple it to
a canvas and then

draw a line with
a sad blue chalk
a great many lopsided

hearts around its teeth
and the small black strands
dangling unmodified,

and then watch
as i glue your sunglasses
in the center of

the space and then
walk away, making like
i ‘m washing my hands.

“i like the first one better”
you say,
“i see myself
as one with two receded eyes
on the same side of the head

under a large ear,
reaching to the world
with this huge truck driver hands…”


it’s dinner time
and the movie
is in an hour
is all i can say?

we are too old
to lose our watches
after the hour
has been paid,

dinner and a show, madam?
you nod, you reach out a hand

and there i am
on the corner
staring into the

pedestrian walk sign
as it blinks whitely
against the encroaching gloom,

thinking of you again
while returning movies,
buying light bulbs,
crossing streets in dream town.