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That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose. There is a melody born of melody, Which melts the world into a sea: Toil could never compass it; Art its height could never hit; It came never out of wit; But a music music-born Well may Jove and Juno scorn. Thy beauty, if it lack the fire Which drives me mad with sweet desire, What boots it? what the soldier's mail, Unless he conquer and prevail? What all the goods thy pride which lift, If thou pine for another's gift? Alas! that one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith, "Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest, Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is sodden;" And another is born To make the sun forgotten. Surely he carries a talisman Under his tongue; Broad are his shoulders, and strong; And his eye is scornful, Threatening, and young. I hold it of little matter Whether your jewel be of pure water, A rose diamond or a white, But whether it dazzle me with light. I care not how you are dressed, In the coarsest or in the best; Nor whether your name is base or brave; Nor for the fashion of your behavior; But whether you charm me, Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me, And dress up Nature in your favor. One thing is forever good; That one thing is Success, — Dear to the Eumenides, And to all the heavenly brood. Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.

Two shall be born the whole world wide apart, And speak in different tongues, and pay their debts In different kinds of coin; and give no heed Each to the other’s being. And know not That each might suit the other to a T, If they were but correctly introduced. And these, unconsciously, shall bend their steps, Escaping Spaniards and defying war, Unerringly toward the same trysting-place, Albeit they know it not. Until at last They enter the same door, and suddenly They meet. And ere they’ve seen each other’s face They fall into each other’s arms, upon The Broadway cable car – and this is Fate!

My father knows the proper way The nation should be run; He tells us children every day Just what should now be done. He knows the way to fix the trusts, He has a simple plan; But if the furnace needs repairs, We have to hire a man. My father, in a day or two Could land big thieves in jail; There’s nothing that he cannot do, He knows no word like “fail.” “Our confidence” he would restore, Of that there is no doubt; But if there is a chair to mend, We have to send it out. All public questions that arise, He settles on the spot; He waits not till the tumult dies, But grabs it while it’s hot. In matters of finance he can Tell Congress what to do; But, O, he finds it hard to meet His bills as they fall due. It almost makes him sick to read The things law-makers say; Why, father’s just the man they need, He never goes astray. All wars he’d very quickly end, As fast as I can write it; But when a neighbor starts a fuss, ’Tis mother has to fight it. In conversation father can Do many wondrous things; He’s built upon a wiser plan Than presidents or kings. He knows the ins and outs of each And every deep transaction; We look to him for theories, But look to ma for action.

The wedding ring I took off myself, his wife wasn’t up to it. I brought the nurse into the room in case he jumped or anything. “Can we turn his head? He looks so uncomfortable.” She looked straight at me, patiently waiting for it to sink in. The snow fell. His truck in the barn, his boots by the door, flagpoles empty. It took a long time for the taxi to come. “Where to?” he said. “My father just died,” I said. As if it were a destination.

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” FRANZ KAFKA Father: On these occasions, the feelings surprise, Spontaneous as rain, and they compel Explicitness, embarrassed eyes—— Son: Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent, But sure. I can already tell The unction and falsetto of the sentiment Which gratifies the facile mouth, but springs From no felt, had, and wholly known things. Father: You must let me tell you what you fear When you wake up from sleep, still drunk with sleep: You are afraid of time and its slow drip, Like melting ice, like smoke upon the air In February’s glittering sunny day. Your guilt is nameless, because its name is time, Because its name is death. But you can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. Son: But I thought time was full of promises, Even as now, the emotion of going away—— Father: That is the first of all its menaces, The lure of a future different from today; All of us always are turning away To the cinema and Asia. All of us go To one indeterminate nothing. Son: Must it be so? I question the sentiment you give to me, As premature, not to be given, learned alone When experience shrinks upon the chilling bone. I would be sudden now and rash in joy, As if I lived forever, the future my toy. Time is a dancing fire at twenty-one, Singing and shouting and drinking to the sun, Powerful at the wheel of a motor-car, Not thinking of death which is foreign and far. Father: If time flowed from your will and were a feast I would be wrong to question your zest. But each age betrays the same weak shape. Each moment is dying. You will try to escape From melting time and your dissipating soul By hiding your head in a warm and dark hole. See the evasions which so many don, To flee the guilt of time they become one, That is, the one number among masses, The one anonymous in the audience, The one expressionless in the subway, In the subway evening among so many faces, The one who reads the daily newspaper, Separate from actor and act, a member Of public opinion, never involved. Integrated in the revery of a fine cigar, Fleeing to childhood at the symphony concert, Buying sleep at the drugstore, grandeur At the band concert, Hawaii On the screen, and everywhere a specious splendor: One, when he is sad, has something to eat, An ice cream soda, a toasted sandwich, Or has his teeth fixed, but can always retreat From the actual pain, and dream of the rich. This is what one does, what one becomes Because one is afraid to be alone, Each with his own death in the lonely room. But there is a stay. You can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. Son: Now I am afraid. What is there to be known? Father: Guilt, guilt of time, nameless guilt. Grasp firmly your fear, thus grasping your self, Your actual will. Stand in mastery, Keeping time in you, its terrifying mystery. Face yourself, constantly go back To what you were, your own history. You are always in debt. Do not forget The dream postponed which would not quickly get Pleasure immediate as drink, but takes The travail of building, patience with means. See the wart on your face and on your friend’s face, On your friend’s face and indeed on your own face. The loveliest woman sweats, the animal stains The ideal which is with us like the sky ... Son: Because of that, some laugh, and others cry. Father: Do not look past and turn away your face. You cannot depart and take another name, Nor go to sleep with lies. Always the same, Always the same self from the ashes of sleep Returns with its memories, always, always, The phoenix with eight hundred thousand memories! Son: What must I do that is most difficult? Father: You must meet your death face to face, You must, like one in an old play, Decide, once for all, your heart’s place. Love, power, and fame stand on an absolute Under the formless night and the brilliant day, The searching violin, the piercing flute. Absolute! Venus and Caesar fade at that edge, Hanging from the fiftieth-story ledge, Or diminished in bed when the nurse presses Her sickening unguents and her cold compresses. When the news is certain, surpassing fear, You touch the wound, the priceless, the most dear. There in death’s shadow, you comprehend The irreducible wish, world without end. Son: I begin to understand the reason for evasion, I cannot partake of your difficult vision. Father: Begin to understand the first decision. Hamlet is the example; only dying Did he take up his manhood, the dead’s burden, Done with evasion, done with sighing, Done with revery. Decide that you are dying Because time is in you, ineluctable As shadow, named by no syllable. Act in that shadow, as if death were now: Your own self acts then, then you know. Son: My father has taught me to be serious. Father: Be guilty of yourself in the full looking-glass.

I lift your body to the boat before you drown or choke or slip too far beneath.  I didn’t think—just jumped, just did what I did like the physics that flung you in.  My hands clutch under year-old arms, between your life jacket and your bobbing frame, pushing you, like a fountain cherub, up and out. I’m fooled by the warmth pulsing from the gash on my thigh, sliced wide and clean by an errant screw on the stern. No pain.  My legs kick out blood below. My arms strain against our deaths to hold you up as I lift you, crying, reaching, to the boat.

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our  DNA. The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down. July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin. The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left Living may have been still at supper while he died. That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washing To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

All fathers in Western civilization must have a military origin. The ruler, governor, yes, he is was the general at one time or other. And George Washington won the hearts of his country—the rough military man with awkward sincere drawing-room manners. My father; have you ever heard me speak of him? I seldom do. But I had a father, and he had military origins—or my origins from him are military, militant. That is, I remember him only in uniform. But of the navy, 30 years a chief petty officer, always away from home. It is rough/hard for me to speak now. I'm not used to talking about him. Not used to naming his objects/ objects that never surrounded me. A woodpecker with fresh bloody crest knocks at my mouth. Father, for the first time I say your name. Name rolled in thick Polish parchment scrolls, name of Roman candle drippings when I sit at my table alone, each night, name of naval uniforms and name of telegrams, name of coming home from your aircraft carrier, name of shiny shoes. name of Hawaiian dolls, name of mess spoons, name of greasy machinery, and name of stencilled names. Is it your blood I carry in a test tube, my arm, to let fall, crack, and spill on the sidewalk in front of the men I know, I love, I know, and want? So you left my house when I was under two. being replaced by other machinery (my sister), and I didn’t believe you left me. This scene: the trunk yielding treasures of a green fountain pen, heart shaped mirror, amber beads, old letters with brown ink, and the gopher snake stretched across the palm tree in the front yard with woody trunk like monkey skins, and a sunset through the skinny persimmon trees. You came walking, not even a telegram or post card from Tahiti. Love, love, through my heart like ink in the thickest nibbed pen, black and flowing into words You came, to me, and I at least six. Six doilies of lace, six battleship cannon, six old beerbottles, six thick steaks, six love letters, six clocks running backwards, six watermelons, and six baby teeth, a six cornered hat on six men's heads, six lovers at once or one lover at sixes and sevens; how I confuse all this with my dream walking the tightrope bridge with gold knots over the mouth of an anemone/tissue spiral lips and holding on so that the ropes burned as if my wrists had been tied If George Washington had not been the Father of my Country it is doubtful that I would ever have found a father. Father in my mouth, on my lips, in my tongue, out of all my womanly fire, Father I have left in my steel filing cabinet as a name on my birth certificate, Father I have left in the teeth pulled out at dentists’ offices and thrown into their garbage cans, Father living in my wide cheekbones and short feet, Father in my Polish tantrums and my American speech, Father, not a holy name, not a name I cherish but the name I bear, the name that makes me one of a kind in any phone book because you changed it, and nobody but us has it, Father who makes me dream in the dead of night of the falling cherry blossoms, Father who makes me know all men will leave me if I love them, Father who made me a maverick, a writer, a namer, name/father, sun/father, moon/father, bloody mars/father, other children said, “My father is a doctor,” or “My father gave me this camera,” or “My father took me to the movies,” or “My father and I went swimming,” but my father is coming in a letter once a month for a while, and my father sometimes came in a telegram but mostly my father came to me in sleep, my father because I dreamed in one night that I dug through the ash heap in back of the pepper tree and found a diamond shaped like a dog, and my father called the dog and it came leaping over to him and he walked away out of the yard down the road with the dog jumping and yipping at his heels, my father was not in the telephone book in my city; my father was not sleeping with my mother at home; my father did not care if I studied the piano; my father did not care what I did; and I thought my father was handsome and I loved him and I wondered why he left me alone so much, so many years in fact, but my father made me what I am, a lonely woman, without a purpose, just as I was a lonely child without any father. I walked with words, words, and names, names. Father was not one of my words. Father was not one of my names. But now I say, “George, you have become my father, in his 20th century naval uniform. George Washington, I need your love; George, I want to call you Father, Father, my Father,” Father of my country, that is, me. And I say the name to chant it. To sing it. To lace it around me like weaving cloth. Like a happy child on that shining afternoon in the palmtree sunset with her mother’s trunk yielding treasures, I cry and cry, Father, Father, Father, have you really come home?

Come with me then, my son; Thine eyes are wide for truth: And I will give thee memories, And thou shalt give me youth. The lake laps in silver, The streamlet leaps her length: And I will give thee wisdom, And thou shalt give me strength. The mist is on the moorland, The rain roughs the reed: And I will give thee patience, And thou shalt give me speed. When lightnings lash the skyline Then thou shalt learn thy part: And when the heav’ns are direst, For thee to give me heart. Forthrightness I will teach thee; The vision and the scope; To hold the hand of honour:— And thou shalt give me hope; And when the heav’ns are deepest And stars most bright above; May God then teach thee duty; And thou shalt teach me love.

Father, where do the wild swans go? Far, far. Ceaselessly winging, Their necks outstraining, they haste them singing Far, far. Whither, none may know. Father, where do the cloud-ships go? Far, far. The winds pursue them, And over the shining heaven strew them Far, far. Whither, none may know. Father, where do the days all go? Far, far. Each runs and races— No one can catch them, they leave no traces— Far, far. Whither, none may know. But father, we—where do we then go? Far, far. Our dim eyes veiling, With bended head we go sighing, wailing Far, far. Whither none may know.