150 Father poems

when i'm gone i want them to remember the camping the dinners the games not the times i was too busy not the times i got it wrong i'm trying to make more of the first kind while there's still time to make them

“Plume,” 1938 I have, more than once, felt my father “pass” through me. Which immediately raised my hackles. I have lived against my father (and against my mother and against my grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandparents); having never made their acquaintance, I have not been able to fight against my more distant forebears. In so doing, what unknown ancestor have I allowed to go on living within me? For the most part, I did not follow the beaten path. In so doing, what unknown ancestor’s path might I have followed? What group, what ancestral average might I have followed? I was constantly changing directions, sometimes it was I who gave them the runaround, sometimes vice versa. A number of them barely had the time to 
appear in a flash, then to vanish. Some would only appear in a given climate, in a given place, in a given position, never elsewhere. So 
numerous, so rapid, so conflicted was their appearance — another major problem — that I never knew exactly whom to lean on. One is born of too many Mothers. — (Ancestors: simple chromosomes, bearers of moral tendencies, what does it matter?) And then the ideas of others, of my contemporaries, everywhere telephoned through space, and my friends, my attempts to imitate or “to go up against.” I would have nonetheless wanted to be the respected head of a laboratory, to be someone considered as having successfully overseen the operations of my “self.” Dispersed, in tatters, I held my own, and there was never anybody in charge, or if there was, I immediately dismissed him. He irritated me right off the bat. Was it he who let me drop? Was it me who told him to get lost? Was it me who held myself back? The young puma is born with spots. After which, he moves 
beyond his markings. This is the force the puma exercises against his ancestors, but he never moves beyond his hunger for meat, his 
playfulness, his cruelty. For too many thousands of years, he has been dealing with his 
conquerors. self makes itself up out of everything. A shift of inflection within a phrase, is this another self attempting to make its appearance? If the yes is mine, is no a second me? Self is never more than provisional (changing as it does when faced with somebody else, an ad hominem self changing when set in another language, another art), always bearing within it a new 
persona, a new character which the slightest accident, the slightest emotion, the slightest blow to the head will liberate to the exclusion of the previous self and which, to general astonishment, often emerges, formed instantaneously — therefore already having taken complete shape beforehand. One is perhaps not made for a single self. One is perhaps wrong to cling to this. One takes unity for granted. (Here, as elsewhere, it is our will that impoverishes us, sacrifices us.) In a doubled, tripled, quintupled life, one would be more at ease, less corroded, less paralyzed by the hostility of the subconscious toward the conscious (the hostility of all those other “selves” that have been dispossessed). What wears one down the most over the course of a day or a lifetime is the effort and the tension necessary to maintain an identical self faced with the continuous temptations to alter it. One wants too much to be someone. There is no single self. There are not ten selves.There is no self.selfis but a point of equilibrium.(One among a thousand others, always possible, always at the ready.) An averaged “self,” a crowd movement. In the name of the many, I sign this book. But was this something I wanted? That we wanted? There was pressure (vis a tergo). A force from the rear. And then? I threw it out there. I was somewhat disconcerted. Every one of the tendencies within me had its own will, just as every thought that presents and organizes itself has its own will. Was this will mine? Many wills inhabit me, this person, that person, a friend, a great man out of the past, Gautama Buddha, many other figures, many lesser figures, Pascal, Ernest Hello? Who knows? The will of the majority? The will of the most cohesive group? I did not wish to be devoid of will. What I willed, it seems to me, went against myself, given that I didn’t wish to will and that nonetheless I did will. ...    Crowd, I managed as best I could amid the movements of my crowd. Given that everything is a crowd, every thought, every instant. Everything past, everything interrupted, everything transformed, 
everything is something else. Nothing ever definitively circumscribed, nor susceptible to being so. Everything: a relation. Mathematics, symbols, music. Nothing fixed. Nothing on the order of property. My images? Relations. My thoughts? But thoughts are perhaps precisely that which runs counter to the “self” — losses of equilibrium (phase 2), or recoveries of equilibrium (phase 3) within the movement of “thinking.” But phase 1 (equilibrium) remains unknown, unconscious. The true, deep flow of thinking no doubt takes place without conscious thought, and without image. The perceived equilibrium (phase 3) is the worst, the one which after a while strikes everybody as loathsome. The history of Philosophy is the history of the false points of conscious equilibrium that have been adopted in succession. And then:is it by the tip of “flames” that fire is to be understood? Let’s be wary of following an author’s thought (even though this author be of the stripe of Aristotle),* let’s rather attend to what he has in mind, what he is getting at, the mark that his desire to dominate and influence, however well hidden, attempts to impress upon us. Besides, what does he know about his thought ?He is quite ill-informed about it.(Just as the eye knows not what composes the greenness of the leaf which it nonetheless sees with such clarity.) He does not know the components of his thought; he might sometimes be aware of the initial ones; but the second ones? the third ones? the tenth ones? No, nor the distant ones, nor the surrounding ones, nor the determining ones, nor the “AHAs!” of his era (which the lowliest high school teacher three hundred years down the line will recognize as obvious). His intentions, his passions, his libido dominandi, his mythomania, his irritability, his need to be right, to triumph, to seduce, to astonish, to believe and make others believe in whatever he so pleases, to cheat, to deceive himself as to his appetites and his disgusts, his complexes and his entire life tuned, without his even knowing it, to his organs, to his glands, to the hidden life of his body, to his physical deficiencies, everything remains unknown to him. His “logical” thought? Well, it circulates within a casing of paralogical and analogical ideas, a path striking out directly by cutting though circular routes, seizing (one only seizes by cutting) the bloody stumps of this so richly vascularized world. (Every garden is rough on trees.) The false simplicity of primary truths (in metaphysics), followed by an extreme multiplicity, which remain to be conveyed. At a single point, willpower and thought flow together, inseparable, and falsify each other. Thought-willpower. At a single point as well, the examination of thought falsifies thought, just as in microphysics the observation of light (the trajectory of the photon) falsifies it. All progress, each new observation, each thought, each creation seems to create (along with light) a zone of darkness. All knowledge creates fresh ignorance. All consciousness, a new unconsciousness. Every new contribution creates a new nothingness. Reader, what you hold here, as is often the case, is a book not made by its author, even though an entire world went into it. And so what? Signs, symbols, élans, pratfalls, departures, relations, discordances, 
everything figures within it — to pick oneself back up from the ground, to go on looking, to seek further, elsewhere. Amid these things, refusing to settle down, the author grew a life. Couldn’t you also perhaps try to do likewise? *Thought is less crucial than the perspective from which it arises. Translated from the French

The lift, the very lift and pull of it! They’d wasted the summer morning, father and son in the devil’s breath of July—gnats wheeling madly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics across the struts, like the canvas skin of a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yard with its humpback boulder, they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twine until the contraption yanked itself from bald earth, high above the matchbox houses on the verge of woods and the sweet-smelling bog, to a height where a boy might peer over the horizon to Boston—and beyond, the ocean. The son was my father. I tottered at his legs, having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s. They payed out the ramshackle affair until it became a postage stamp. The line burned a bloody groove into my palms, the last time they stood at ease with each other.

Tonight I will remember the model With the wide, sad mouth Who used to pose for father Because I love the dangers of memory, The boarded window and door, Rooms where one bare bulb Makes shadows swell up the wall. And yet I recall only vaguely The way her hem rustled on the floor Like sand against tin Laisse-moi tranquille, epicier, It said because I want it to Say something memorable. I want her back That brilliant, farfetched woman Who drank coffee in our garden And the days father fed me Absinthe through a sugar cube So I would be asleep by noon And wake to find Ramona posing Naked with a tambourine. Tonight the whole world is a garden In which the immortal whispers Something about art And its opportunities: Memory like a bolt of silk In a tailor’s arms Can be made into anything Especially misfortune, Especially the year Ramona spent In a wrath almost Biblical And so far from the world Not even the moon could find Her study in Paris Where the doors opened to the river.

Give me back my father walking the halls of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company with sawdust clinging to his shoes. Give me back his tape measure and his keys, his drafting pencil and his order forms; give me his daydreams on lined paper. I don't understand this uncontainable grief. Whatever you had that never fit, whatever else you needed, believe me, my father, who wanted your business, would squat down at your side and sketch you a container for it.

My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand the bill from Strawbridge’s held high the bill from Bonwit Teller and the all plum-colored Blum Store. His anger smells like dinner parties like trays of frothy daiquiris. Against the pre-World-War-Two prime standing ribs his carving knife flashes a little drunkenly. He charms all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives but something overripe malingers. I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers. Oh God it is so noisy! Under my bed a secret stair a gold and purple escalator takes me nightly down under the sea. Such dancings, such carryings on with the prince of this-or-that with the duke of ne’er-do-well I the plain one, a size too large to tell grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly see shopping is an art form a kind of costume ball. Papá, would we so humbly come to the scene in the upstairs hall on the first of every month, except you chose the mice for footmen, clapped to call up the coach and four? You sent to Paris for the ermine muff that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor little things had their heads chopped off to keep my hands unseemly warm! When you went fishing down the well for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes velvet evening capes, what else befell? You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.

Dad would come home after too long at work and I’d sit on his lap to hear the story of Ferdinand the Bull; every night, me handing him the red book until I knew every word, couldn’t read, just recite along with drawings of a gentle bull, frustrated matadors, the all-important bee, and flowers— flowers in meadows and flowers thrown by the Spanish ladies. Its lesson, really, about not being what you’re born into but what you’re born to be, even if that means not caring about the capes they wave in your face or the spears they cut into your shoulders. And Dad, wonderful Dad, came home after too long at work and read to me the same story every night until I knew every word, couldn’t read, just recite.

Like the moon that night, my father — a distant body, white and luminous. How small I was back then, looking up as if from dark earth. Distant, his body white and luminous, my father stood in the doorway. Looking up as if from dark earth, I saw him outlined in a scrim of light. My father stood in the doorway as if to watch over me as I dreamed. When I saw him outlined — a scrim of light — he was already waning, turning to go. Once, he watched over me as I dreamed. How small I was. Back then, he was already turning to go, waning like the moon that night — my father.

For once, he was just my father. We drove to the Computing Center in a Monte Carlo Landau not technically ours. Lexington, 1977. That fall. The color had settled, too, undone orange-brown and dull yellow, crimson. And it was something, yet not, the pile of  leaves just a pile of  leaves. Sorry to think what thinking has done to landscape: He loved punched cards, program decks and subroutines, assembly languages and keypunch machines. Even my father looked small next to a mainframe. The sound of order; the space between us. We almost laughed, but not for years — we almost laughed. But not. For years, the space between us, the sound of order next to a mainframe. Even my father looked small. And keypunch machines, assembly languages, program decks and subroutines. He loved punched cards, what thinking has done to landscape — just a pile of leaves. Sorry to think, yet not, the pile of leaves crimson. And it was. Something orange-brown and dull yellow had settled, too, undone 1977, that fall, the color not technically ours, Lexington in a Monte Carlo Landau. We drove to the Computing Center. For once he was just, my father.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff, whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never, or those that end, and he was silent as a carp, or those with middles which, if you think of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights in the woods, they've read every word and noticed that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like "My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine." They're not trying to make the poems better so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook or electrocution, as a group they overcome their individual senilities, their complete distaste for language, how cloying it is, how like tears it can be, and remember every mention of their long hours at the office or how tired they were when they came home, when they were dragged through the door by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked, not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence was his presence, his present, the Cheerios, the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees, that they're the most intricate version of standing up, who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy. A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me, and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted the rocket cars, as if running away from them to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did start to say something, to form the words hey or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun, into the burning leave, and were gone before it came to them that it was all right to shout, that they should have knocked us down with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified by the distance men need in their love.