A Peak in Darien

9th November 2011 Wednesday

Tired tonight - can’t write much. Wish I was a poet and could get to the heart of the matter in a few beautiful words.

My father sits in the wing back chair in his new empty feeling room and looks small and white faced. He says my sister and I look like giants compared to the carer who comes to check his catheter. We know her - she worked in the home where our mother lived the few years before she died - a familiar, friendly face.

He says his only problem is that he can’t remember who

‘looked, silent, upon a peak in Darien’.

It’s a line from a poem which has been snagging at the edges of his mind while he was in hospital. He says my husband would know, at least he would have known - before. But maybe not - he didn’t ever study Keats' poetry. It’s just that my father has this fantasy that my husband knew all sorts of things he never did.

I Google the Keats poem later - it’s called On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.

It was ‘stout Cortez’ who looked at that peak.

I’m sure my husband was not familiar with that poem. But he would have known who Homer is and what stout means.

I wish, like my father, that I could be that easily distracted by poetry.