150 Father poems

I imagine my father’s death. It is bigger than a breadbox. It is bigger than a Ford Escort, than a Zeppelin, black and vast and slow moving, oozing over an Oklahoma arena. It is bigger than any arena, than Oklahoma. My father’s death is bigger than a planet, bigger than the gravity wells worlds make, that stars stir up after implosion. It is bigger than all the stars. It takes up all space, all dimension, all that is or ever was. It hates everything it isn’t. It makes new space, new matter from all it is. My father’s death takes on form and void and says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. It says, “Let there be worlds.” And there are worlds. It says, “Let there be a garden and a man in it.” And there is a man. The man is my father. He looks around, marveling at this thing his death has made, then sets out to find someone, anyone, with whom to share it.

I stand alone at the foot Of my father’s grave, Trembling to tell: The door to the granary is open, Sir, And someone lost the bucket To the well.

What did I know, what did I know Of gazing silences and terrored stone Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten The auroral darkness which is God Then you arrived, meditative, ironic My head gripped in bony vice Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter What did I know, what did I know Of a changing permanence The stains and dirty tools of struggle Weaving a wish and a weariness together Years before your time. Years and years I gaze through layered light Within the rock of the undiscovered suns I see, I walk with you among The landscape lush, metallic, flayed Behind us, beyond us now The very sunlight here seems flammable

It’s my favorite photo— captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.” It’s in black and white, it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon, before his tongue became a knife that made my mother bleed, and before he blackened my eye the time he thought I meant to end my life. He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road beneath the old chestnut tree. He’s wearing sunglasses, a light cotton shirt, and a dreamy expression. He’s twenty-seven. I’m two. My hair, still baby curls, is being tossed by a gentle breeze. I’m fast asleep in his arms.

My four-year-old daughter handed me a card. To Daddy written on the front and inside a rough field of  five-pointed lights, and the words You’re my favorite Daddy in the stars. In this western night we all light the sky like Vega, Deneb, Altair, Albireo, the Summer Triangle, Cygnus the Swan, our hair tangled with wood and gravel, our eyes like vacant docks that beckon every boat. Tell me about the word stars, I said. Oh, she said. Sorry. I didn’t know how to spell world.

Almost droll in its assault on magisterial, my father’s funeral sermon made me prowl, —agitated—from bean casserole to escarole salad, then taco casserole, and back all afternoon, in thrall to Dad’s every growl, cramped certitude, and corporal wavering lost to shrill sacral cant: The pastoral story was Dad’s own, though, frail as it is: faith and God steamroll death. His wife’s and daughter’s role was to die—a trial of faith, not cruel so much as natural, when the supernatural is, as it was for him, literal. His cloistral withdrawal, according to the minister’s drawl, was grace, and his temporal forfeitures fat collateral on eternity. It felt surreal (can there be a funeral without, now, the word surreal?) to hear Dad’s stoic control and loneliness spiral heavenward on genial praise, real enough for the general, one supposes. An orchestral hymn flared through the stereo’s cloth grill. Cold waves over the deep water roll, we sang, some voices shrill, mine guttural, my brother’s slow as a crawl— our voices one and several, a visceral, not unmagisterial, chorale.

A furnace in my father’s voice; I prayed for the coal stove’s roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle on fire in the harbor we never walked, father and son, father drifting down the ferned hell his shanty shone, where, inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp. The market, the park, the library not a soul but grandmother’s morning wash lifting toward heaven, the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my hand in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth. My little earthshaker, visored in placenta, wonder of wonders, tremulous in amniotic shield, ensouled already, father in the veritable night, without house or harbor, soon sea in a voice will harrow a scorpion’s blaze in me, to the marrow.

My pa he didn’t go to town Last evening after tea, But got a book and settled down As comfy as could be. I’ll tell you I was offul glad To have my pa about To answer all the things I had Been tryin’ to find out. And so I asked him why the world Is round instead of square, And why the piggies’ tails are curled, And why don’t fish breathe air? And why the moon don’t hit a star, And why the dark is black, And just how many birds there are, And will the wind come back? And why does water stay in wells, And why do June bugs hum, And what’s the roar I hear in shells, And when will Christmas come? And why the grass is always green, Instead of sometimes blue, And why a bean will grow a bean And not an apple, too? And why a horse can’t learn to moo, And why a cow can’t neigh? And do the fairies live on dew, And what makes hair grow gray— And then my pa got up an’ gee! The offul words he said, I hadn’t done a things, but he Jest sent me off to bed.

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.

[ for my dad ] The fallen Latte is the sign.It is from within the row of Latte that we feel our strength. It is the severed capstone that gives us Their message