B.E.F.

Your life has shrunken only to memories
That aren’t even your own.  It’s me
Who cares to remember your eyes’ colour,
And the calloused touch of your hand
As you stroked my hair when I was a boy,
Told me stories of God, or laughed,
Saying there was nothing in the water
That a fish couldn’t drink—like me
Re-making from the flickering
Of what I believe to have happened once,
The story of you.  Trace for me
The curve of Time.  Press my back against it
Like the sunlit sky of August
Before twilight, harvest and age.