History, the way it will saunter in
through the body’s unwary door
 
while bathing say, vague perhaps with absence,
or pondering consciousness – that strange transparency
 
Spinoza tells us veneers the world –
when you catch yourself holding your hand to your chin
 
the middle finger lifting so the nail taps the eye tooth,
and wham, you’re back in your father’s house –

 
It’s summer, there’s a river and a jacaranda tree.
He is sitting in front of the black balustrade
 
legs crossed, lean in his woven chair,
eyes horizon-high (remember though, they always saw
 
the traffic beneath the roses).
He is bright with enterprise, devising strategy –
 
how best build a jetty to accommodate tide,
how season a timbered hull?
 
His thumb and fourth finger support the jaw
and the sawn-off tip of his index
 
finger is held to his cheek-bone inches from the eye –
but it’s his mouth! It is parted just enough
 
so the middle finger flutters between his front teeth,
the nail tapping (you know exactly)
 
the pad rebounding, and after a while
the soft, ruminative bite.

 
Heralded by gesture – your father’s, yours,
(his dear presence) – you begin to consider
 
‘it’s bred in the bone’,
the deep intelligence of the body.
 
Surprise returns you to that most-forgotten land –
its ruined mountains – though small thoughts intrude too
 
(the bath’s grown cold, there are essays to assess,
photographs to post to a daughter in the north
 
of women with marled skin, statues of Eurydice,
Hera’s marmoreal arms).

 
But the word inhere keeps insisting on itself.
Like breath from a beloved’s lips, its zither passes over you
 
so you rise from the bath, draw a towel to the rib-
and-tingle of your frame and head for the computer
 
leaving drips, webbed footprints (gills? hooves?)
along the glimmering hall. Ah, History, your worn
 
thumb, still strumming away? Still printing? We are
where the hammer falls (more or less). Room though,
 
for manoeuvre.