A Matter of View: (From a Book of Annotations) by Francesca Rendle-Short
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A Matter of View: (From a Book of Annotations)
by Francesca Rendle-Short
published November 2014
1.
In my father’s house.
In my father’s house, a place reduced now to a single room in a nursing home perched on an escarpment somewhere in the southeast corner of Queensland on the Great Dividing Range, there is an inscription in my father’s handwriting in the front of his favourite Bible. This Bible sits on a shelf in a small library of books that surrounds his bed—amongst books on theology, paediatrics, creationism, and the like. The annotation reads:
I must always remember that the English Bible came to
us from a crucible of terror. Do not meddle with it.
My father. He lies dying. What do these words mean? Exactly?
That he would be gone the next day. Really gone.
Will these notes on mourning bring him back? Stop the clock? This “kind of numbness,” Roland Barthes writes as notes on his maman’s death in “A Cruel Country,” “which is not a moment of forgetfulness. This terrifies me.”
2.
See: my mother’s paintings standing watch behind my father’s head. He would like that touch. The white ducks. The white fence.
3.
How beautiful are his hands too, familiar; I did like to hold them sometimes.
Remember those long elegant fingers.
And his head also, to kiss goodbye, put the tangles to rest, release some kind of joy.
Back to “Poetic Cartography, Love, and Loss: Piecing Together a Father”