(In memory of my father, Florentino Evasco)
Invoking the Presences
I would like to begin with a poem which I wrote many years ago for my father, Florentino Evasco. On March 14, he would have been 85 years old. This poem is published in my first book Dreamweavers and part of a cycle entitled “Blood Remembering.” It is called “The Mound of Bones”:
Behind the house,
A mound of earth
Kept my father
Busy digging.
From here the house
Was to extend
A listening ear
To the bamboo grove
And the frogpond.
But father struck
A pile of bones
And was soon lost
In contemplation.
Mother died
When he was fifty.
He told me then the secret
Of the mound of bones:
How the enchanted trees
Dug deep roots and curled
Around the skulls;
How one day, another man
Will uproot other trees and
Unearth our own,
And be lost in
His own reflection.