Flat earth: how
could they have thought it?
Where did they imagine that the sail

they watched diminish on a morning clear
as repining sank and yet sometimes
returned? And what
could he be seeing
now, my father on his doorstep,
one hand shielding his eyes, one raised

as if I was that sail, or more workaday
funnel (ferry, cruise ship or perhaps
the last boat out)
that's gone
all but its smear on the haze?
Diminishment. You'd think it was the air

not his eyes fogging over — wipe, try
to wipe it with a wave, as I drop
not so much
out of sight
as out of question; feel myself
becoming hypothetical, not so much a fable

as that rattling loose-change data off the edge
of a world view, that we have
to dismiss
for fear the world
slips off its spindle.
Squinting into his gaze, I see myself

become a visitation, the kind
known by the vague
cool space
it leaves behind it,
as empty and charged
with a flavour, a heft, as the place

in which another word that he had
yesterday persists
in being,
almost ruthlessly…