Family faces modulate like variations on a theme, so that in chordal passages the decades shift without a seam, the living echoing the dead to dress themselves in borrowed grace. I like to find my father's look safe in my son's unwounded face. Such grave harmonics lend us back the only paradise we know: an idle game with time, but still, not bad, as resurrections go.© Rhina P. Espaillat
From Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press, 2001),
winner of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award.