Variations

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 Landscapes with Women: Four
American Poets, Singular Speech Press,
© 1999.  Reprinted by permission of the
author.