150 Father poems

From raindrenched Homeland into a well: the upturned animal was mine by law and outside the tunnel, him again! Everywhere I turned the children ran between. “Loose dogs!” he roared. I remember one sequence: a gulf in his thinking meant swim as fast as you can. But it was winter and the water was closed. The mouths of the children were sealed with ice. After all, we were swimming in emotion, not water. “Shut up! you Father!” I shouted over my shoulder. Racing, but not spent, my mind went, “It isn’t good that the human being is all I have to go by .... It isn’t good that I know who I love but not who I trust .... It isn’t good that I can run to a priest but not to a plane .... I lost my way exactly like this.” Inverted tunnel of the self. Throat or genital search for the self. Light that goes on in the self when the eyes are shut. Uniformity impossible in the psyche’s pre-self like a day never spent, or how the unseen can make itself felt. It was as if a boy was calling from the end of a long island. Docks were vertical and warlike. I would be on one side of my bed like a mother who can tell she’s a comfort because she’s called Mother. Still, we both would be able to see the edge of the problem. It’s true that the person is also a thing. When you are running you know the texture. I was clawing at the palm of one hand and brushing up my blues with the other. A man who wore his boxers at night remarked that my daughter was tired. He had nothing to do with anything. Ahead was the one with magnified eyes and historical data to last. Know-how and the hysteria to accomplish his whole life. It was horrible what we would do for peace. We told him the story of the suffering he made us feel with the ingratiating stoop of those who came second in the world.

You know how, after it rains, my father told me one August afternoon when I struggled with something hurtful my best friend had said, how worms come out and crawl all over the sidewalk and it stays a big mess a long time after it’s over if you step on them? Leave them alone, he went on to say, after clearing his throat, and when the rain stops, they crawl back into the ground.

My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages. My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming. *    *   * Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants. Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties. No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter. *    *   * Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent. I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates. *    *   * During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars. Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows. *    *   * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security. I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair. “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.

Because one must be naked to get clean, my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt, steps from his boxers and into the tub as I brace him, whose long illness has made him shed modesty too. Seated on the plastic bench, he holds the soap like a caught fish in his lap, waiting for me to test the water’s heat on my wrist before turning the nozzle toward his pale skin. He leans over to be doused, then hands me the soap so I might scrub his shoulders and neck, suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft. Like a child he wants a washcloth to cover his eyes while I lather a palmful of pearlescent shampoo into his craniotomy-scarred scalp and then rinse clear whatever soft hair is left. Our voices echo in the spray and steam of this room where once, long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge to pour cups of bathwater over my head. He reminds me to wash behind his ears, and when he judges himself to be clean, I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar, steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me, his body is dripping and frail and pink. And although I am nearly forty, he has this one last thing to teach me. I hold open the towel to receive him.

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said, and indeed I was standing exactly in the center of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so. You’re stepping on your father, she repeated, louder this time, which began to be strange to me, since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it. I moved slightly to the side, to where my father ended and my mother began. The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees; I could hear, very faintly, sounds of  weeping several rows away, and beyond that, a dog wailing. At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mind I had no memory of   being driven here, to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have been a cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park, a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses — douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of  living, as the saying goes. At some point, it occurred to me I was alone. Where had the others gone, my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail? By now the light was fading. Where was the car waiting to take us home? I then began seeking for some alternative. I felt an impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety. Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train, stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductor lingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette. Do not forget me, I cried, running now over many plots, many mothers and fathers —

Mahogany maple syrup runs in spider web lines. My father never uses the stuff, he eats pancakes, powdered, butter moist. When I was a child, he knew more of straightness. Lines and razors were friends. One night he tried to die by his hand. A girl jumped before he walked to the ledge. Her mangled body wore the rails like a girdle, her limbs so thin they became a blood putty. Angel, her name. They had to lift the train to take her out.

I taught him to drive in the empty church parking lot on a sunday morning he hit the curb twice i didn't flinch or i tried not to he was watching for it

I went to every game even the ones i couldn't afford to miss work for i missed work i went to the games he doesn't know this i'm not going to tell him that's not why i did it

My father's hands were never soft wood and soil and hard use the hands of someone who solved problems with them i have his hands i realized it one day in the kitchen and stood there for a while

i held the seat for longer than she knew and then i let go she went six feet and fell we did it seventeen more times she got it on the eighteenth i pretended i wasn't crying she didn't notice