150 Father poems

If one takes a walk on a clear sunny day in middle April, when the first willows are in bloom, one may often see young bumblebee queens eagerly sipping nectar from the catkins

I took my boy to hear an echo. He wanted to hear one. I wanted him to. We wended through a half-formed unintelligible brushy wood to a place I knew called “cave.” It had openings at both ends and could be seen through, not into. Nor was it a tunnel, strictly, though it passed through the ground, though it went somewhere. It was like stepping into a telescope unseen, into the dark distorted center. The walls were arched and laid with glazed tiles, orange, aqua, muddy green and so streaked with nervous lines where water had run down, where water must have trellised down still. It was not clean. It smelled of piss. Chicken bones, empties, old rubbers, mold. Echo, I called. So did my boy. But his voice was small—birdscratch—it got all lost inside the echo my voice made; pale echo, barely one. That was when I had a boy. I’m quite sure I did. I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer, when I wasn’t in this place, where light passes through me, when I wasn’t like this, which is what, when I wanted one, as he, poor boy, wanted me.

My father, rather a quiet man, told a story only the one time, if even then—he had so little need, it seemed, of being understood. Intervals of years, his silences! Late in his life he recalled for us that when he was sixteen, his papa entrusted to him a wagonload of hogs, which he was to deliver to the train depot, a half-day’s ride from home, over a hilly dirt road. Lightly he held the reins, light his heart, the old horses, as ever, willing. In town at noon he heard the station- master say the train had been delayed, would not arrive until that evening. The boy could only wait. At home they’d wait for him and worry and would place the kerosene lamp in the window. Thus the day had turned to dusk before he turned about the empty wagon, took his weary horses through the cloud of fireflies that was the little town. In all his years he’d never seen those lights—he thought of this, he said, until he and his milk-white horses came down the last moonlit hill to home, drawn as from a distance toward a single flame.

Her small body shines with water and light. Giggling, she squeals “daddy,” splashes until his pants darken. Five more minutes, he thinks, stepping out quickly, pouring himself a drink, not expecting to return to find her slipped under, her tiny face staring up through the undulating surface. Before he can move, or drop his scotch, she raises her dripping head, her mouth a perfect O. The sound of her gulped breath takes the wind out of him. Her face, pale and awed, understands the other side of water and air. His wife didn’t see, doesn’t know. Her feet pulse and fade in the upstairs joists. His daughter cries, slips from him, not giggling. She wants out. He tries to keep her in the tub, in the light. He’s on his knees.

From the platform, iron iterates way into time. The tracks are staples intervaled along my father’s spine. Before me might be somebody’s father, waited for — white choker of a condor, dry lips of lifelong acolyte. I barely brush his arm, so as not to make him start. Who knows how he might play out: cave in, tear apart? He deeds toward me, wet wood breakable. All in all of direst bark. This is how it starts, at last, I recall. “I thought you were someone, otherwise.” The rail lines rattle like beetle files. He frowns. Establishes his palms. “Tell me. Does that happen often, lamb?”

The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer. The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn. Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books. The rain beats on the windows And the raindrops run down the window glass And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding. The boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history, Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged. The boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom. Buffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas snuggling close to New Mexico, These creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County. Alexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes. Only once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say ‘my first wife’ so-and-so and such-and-such. A few times softly the father has told Alexander, ‘Your mother . . . was a beautiful woman . . . but we won’t talk about her.’ Always Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father mention ‘my first wife’ or ‘Alexander’s mother.’ Alexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar, and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life. These two come into Alexander’s head blurry and grey while the rain beats on the windows and the raindrops run down the window glass and the raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding. These and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or sun unless there is a God? So from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the buffaloes and blizzards of Texas and on to his mother and to God, so the blurry grey rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, maybe ten, keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.

Tonight, I am in search of clues on how to be a man, not a man like my father, who traded his motorcycle for a job in the plane yards after my mother left. Before my father tried telling me wrestling was fake, we watched men scrap with brass knuckles and bull ropes. Back then, a dude could get his jaw broke calling the wrong guy a fake. Lou Thesz was a bona fide grappler, stretching men with that toehold facelock, snapping men’s elbows to protect his championship belt. My grandfather saw him lose the title to Bronko Nagurski, celebrated footballer who stomped men into the turf on his way to the end zone. Before my father died, he insisted my grandfather never saw that match, that men always invent things when they have something genuine to say. Today, everyone knows that fight was fixed. Tonight, I am thinking about all those shapes Lou Thesz could twist out of a man’s skeleton, and how some nights that just isn’t enough.

1. In the windless late sunlight of August, my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back, the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy rippled. I watched from a shallow hill as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck, galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced at the fire trench, circled back, arced again, the flames behind sketching first a C , then closing to O —a word or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart, gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence, some cinch-corral she might have known, the way the walls moved rhythmically, in and in. And to the crows, manic on the thermals? A crescent of their planet, gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter past the fence line, then settle on a Hereford's tufted nape, as if to peck some safer grain, as if the red-cast back it rode contained no transformations. 2. A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there and there, the russet flood of rabbits. Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls began, shrill and wavering, as if their dormant voice strings had tightened into threads of glass. In an instant they were gone—the rabbits, their voices—over the fire trench, into the fallows. My father walked near the burn line, waved up to me, and from that wave, or the rippled film of heat, I remembered our porch in an August wind, how he stepped through the weathered doorway, his hand outstretched with some book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but as he spoke it atomized before us— pulp and stem, the pollened tongue, dreadful in the dancing air. 3. Scummed and boxcar thin, six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields. Inside them, lilies, lilies— a thousand shades of white, I think. Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax. Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed ancestral to me, the fluted heads of dowagers, their meaty, groping, silent tongues. They seemed to form perspective's chain: cinder, bone, divinity. . . 4. My father waved. The crows set down. By evening, our fields took the texture of freshened clay, a sleek and water-bloated sheen, although no water rested there—just heat and ash united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line, circled closer, the grasses all around me collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems— brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown to echo grass. The soot was warm, the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing, and as a breeze crossed slowly through, stems glowed—then ebbed— consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path, and then a kind of journey.

Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away—but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men’s business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand—looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.

Shakey Eyes Horton had nystagmus too. That’s what my father said and took me to the record store so we could buy him and take him home to listen. Babe says he’s so square but we go all over. We listen to music for hours and dance around the house like crazy skeletons: loose with all our bones knocking, we go, “click click click” and wave our arms and shake until we rattle all the china in mom’s cabinet. He turns the volume up and we spin like planets round the sun. Babe says he’s no fun but I know different because I see him laughing and I try, which she just never does. She walks into the house with Jasper waiting in the car. She grabs some clothes or asks for money, though she doesn’t even come to do that anymore. They don’t even talk. Last time we had the music on loud and we were dancing. I was letting my head swing back and forth and she just stood and watched us with the strangest look and I said, “I’m Shakey Eyes! Come dance,” and moved my arms around. I followed her up the stairs, swinging like a satellite and going, “Ooh ooh ooooohhhhh,” just like a low-down good- for-nothing so and so. I know she thinks I’m funny but she didn’t laugh and I said, “Come dance! You know you’ve got the blues.” Then I said, “You’re no fun.” She said, “You don’t know him like I do.”