TRANSFIGURED TIME

The house where my father will be born
is still unfinished.
It lacks the wall my hands have not yet built.

His footsteps searching for me across the earth
now come towards this street.
Yet I can't hear them, they still don't reach me.

Behind that door are echoes
and voices I recognise miles off,
but they are spoken only by portraits.

The face not seen in any mirror,
because it's late being born
or still doesn't exist,
could be of any one of us —
it looks like all of us.

My bones are not in that tomb
but those of my great-uncle Zacarias
who used a walking stick and pseudonym.
My own remains have long been lost.

This poem was written in another century,
some night by a guttering candle,
by me, by someone else, I don't recall.
Time consumed the flame
and lingered in my darkened hands
and in these eyes that never read the poem.
When the candle returns with its light
I'll already be gone.