150 Father poems

My father’s farm is an apple blossomer. He keeps his hills in dandelion carpet and weaves a lane of lilacs between the rose and the jack-in-the-pulpits. His sleek cows ripple in the pastures. The dog and purple iris keep watch at the garden’s end. His farm is rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon. His crops suck rain from the sky and swallow the smoldering sun. His fields are oceans of heat, where waves of gold beat the burning shore. A red fox pauses under the birch trees, a shadow is in the river’s bend. When the hawk circles the land, my father’s grainfields whirl beneath it. Owls gather together to sing in his woods, and the deer run his golden meadow. My father’s farm is an icicle, a hillside of white powder. He parts the snowy sea, and smooths away the valleys. He cultivates his rows of starlight and drags the crescent moon through dark unfurrowed fields.

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.

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.

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed. We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant. His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall. He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always, we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!” Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right” before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right for the first time.” And then the vessel burst, and we were kneeling around an emptiness. We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us, yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm, the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word. Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress— a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we could do right if we would bless him? The dying must feel the pressure of that question— lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot cowards there above protesting their love, and saying, “What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens and the blue night pours through. “What can we do? We want to do what’s right.” “Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be with me. Feel with me.Feel me to do right.”

After my father died, my mother and my sisters picked the shirt, the tie; he had just the one suit. I left them to it, I didn't want to choose, I loved him all those years. They took a shirt from the closet, I don't remember which one, I'm sure he had worn it to church and hung it up again. They held a tie against the cloth of the shirt. They decided, finally. It's like that. Things come down to the pale blue or the white, or some other. Someone buttoned it over him, those buttons he had unbuttoned.