150 Father poems

Whenever my father was left with nothing to do — waiting for someone to 'get ready', or facing the gap between graduate seminars and dull after-suppers in his study grading papers or writing a review — he played the piano. I think of him packing his lifespan carefully, like a good leather briefcase, each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages for the left hand and right hand by Chopin or difficult Schumann; nothing inside it ever rattled loose. Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue on the blade of his reasonable logic. Only at the piano did he become the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic. The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata could have been Brahms. Boredom, or what he disapproved of as 'sitting around with your mouth open' oddly pursued him. He had small stamina. Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis, the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden, missing its musical swim-bladder. None of this suggests how natural he was. For years I thought fathers played the piano just as dogs barked and babies grew. We children ran in and out of the house, taking for granted that the 'Trout' or E flat Major Impromptu would be rippling around us. For him, I think, playing was solo flying, a bliss of removal, of being alone. Not happily always; never an escape, for he was affectionate, and the household hum he pretended to find trivial or ridiculous daily sustained him. When he talked about music, it was never of the lachrimae rerum that trembled from his drawn-out phrasing as raindrops phrase themselves along a wire; no, he defended movable doh or explained the amazing physics of the octave. We'd come in from school and find him cross-legged on the jungle of the floor, guts from one of his Steinways strewn about him. He always got the pieces back in place. I remember the yellow covers of Schirmer's Editions and the bound Peters Editions in the bookcase. When he defected to the cello in later years Grandmother,in excrucio, mildly exclaimed, 'Wasn't it lovely when Steve liked to play the piano.' Now I'm the grandmother listening to Steve at the piano. Lightly, in strains from Brahms-Haydn variations, his audible image returns to my humming ears.

For my father I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us — everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places — you upstream a few yards and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots and you grew heavier with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide's casting then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried — again and again — to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past — working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write — one day — when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding — my back to where I know we are headed.

My father was A blossom, And I was his fragile Epiphyte on his Days off. The purple Dogs of years Gone by Watch him smile At the horizon. His feretory Catches the Rain from the Smoldering sky. These fields are Fallow and dried Gullies where gin Sparkled In the morning. My father’s remains Are smooth like the Starlight that Makes my life Slightly yellow.

A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it. Worry 1. A dog’s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this. It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn’t work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in their boy's face. Worry 8. Cause mental distress or agitation to (a person, oneself); make anxious and ill at ease. 9. Give way to anxiety, unease, or disquietude: allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or troubles. He waits for his father’s death. His father has been taken off the ventilator and clearly will not be able to breathe for himself much longer. Earlier in the day the nurse mentioned something about an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves in the cerebral hemispheres, the parts of the brain that deal with speech and memory. But his brain stem is damaged; it seems now the test will not be necessary. The son expects an almost silent, hollow gasp to come from the old man’s open mouth. Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind. The release is jerky and convulsive. There is never the rasp or the choke the son expects, though one meaning of worry is to be choked on, to choke on.

Or a man who looks like him. I only know I call him Daddy (as all southern women do until the day we die). In my dreams he is still alive and this is not a comfort. I am my best when tragic. Grief becomes me. Daddy is more real in death, eyes dark, undimmed by the grave, smile less sincere. Matter clings to his thick eyebrows, his mouth spits mud when he tries to talk. He is candid. He tells me he liked my sisters better than me. Most times I search for him in a crowd of counterfeit Daddies. I look for pieces of him. An elbow. Black hair on the back of a pale neck. If I find him, I will say,Is that you? I know you this time.

As phantoms direct life from the shadows, I feel I leaned on something, and it broke. My father on the porch with his crosswords said, this must be what it feels like to be dead; When I returned from the dead there was no one to greet me, but still you are glad— I wander the ruins the way my tongue wanders my missing teeth, the bricks and mortar of Deep Deuce rotted like molars in an ancient mouth; Here Charlie Christian might have walked— The astrologer counseled patience and creative imaging: Step One: Visualize an object that symbolizes the accursed influence. Picture yourself throwing it into a furnace. Step two: Visualize the person who is responsible for the curse. Imagine one end of a rope is tied around your waist and the other around that person. Picture yourself cutting the rope with a chainsaw as you call out, “You have no power over me!” Step three: Repeat twice a day for eleven days . . . You visualize her green boots inside the furnace . . . —No. You are in a crematorium and you see her perfect and corruptible body on a tray sliding into fire; Then you see yourself cutting the rope that ties you together with a saw; And then at last your own imperfect and corruptible body—I mean, me—calls out and I jump in after her.

I have my father’s hair.Not much of a gift, chick, but can’t say I’m not generous.

My father drummed darkness Through the underbrush Until lightning struck I take after him Clouds crowd the sky Around me as I run Downhill on a high— I am my mother's son Born long ago In the storm's eye

My father is a nod, a jilt. Bop. Insists that 90s music is the jams they will drop when I have children. Cancel the station with rap-crap, the cure for stiff-skin is the blunk of funk and lilt of lips that pickles like sound-curry.

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.