150 Father poems

my dad's going to give me a self back. i've made an altar called The Altar for Healing the Father & Child, & asked him what i could do for him so he would do nice for me. he said i should stop saying bad things about him &, since i've said just about everything bad i can think of &, since . . . well, no, i change my mind, i can't promise him that. but even healing is negotiable, so, if he's in heaven (or trying to get in), it wouldn't hurt to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling down the list of things i have to do & enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring the cupboards, i found a can of sardines that must be five years old &, since i was home after a long trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn't eaten dinner &, since there was no other protein in the house, i cranked it open & remembered that my dad loved sardines—right before bed—with onions & mustard. i can't get into my dad's old heart, but i remember that look on his face when he would load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice of onion. then he'd look up from his soiled fingers with one eyebrow raised, a rakish grin that said—all for me!—as if he was getting away with murder.

for my father, 1922-1944 Your face did not rot like the others—the co-pilot, for example, I saw him yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stare as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot like the others—it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now, with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested scholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god, I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you. My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.

When he was my age and I was already a boy my father made a machine in the garage. A wired piece of steel with many small and beautiful welds ground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls. He went broke with whatever it was. He held it so carefully in his arms. He carried it foundry to foundry. I think it was his harp, I think it was what he longed to make with his hands for the world. He moved it finally from the locked closet to the bedroom to the garage again where he hung it on the wall until I climbed and pulled it down and rubbed it clean and tried to make it work.

From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry. His crudeness destined me to be the same. A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap, I came, the crowning glory of his aim. From Mother I inherited ennui, The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled. But I won’t let such chains imprison me. And there is just no telling what this brat’ll...! This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it. What’s pearl turns piss, what’s classy breeds what’s smutty. But like it? Lump it? Neither’s exigent. And I’m the end result of all that fucking. Do what you will! This world’s your oyster, Pet. But be forewarned. The sea might drown you yet.

The pull of guns I understand, my father taught me hand on hand how death is. Life asserts. (Best take it like a man.) I shot a dove, the common sort and mourned not life but life so short that gazed from death as if unhurt. And I had nothing to report.

My father had our yard cemented over. He couldn’t tell a flower from a weed. The neighbors let their backyards run to clover and some grew dappled gardens from a seed, but he preferred cement to rampant green. Lushness reeked of anarchy’s profusion. Better to tamp the wildness down, unseen, than tolerate its careless brash intrusion. The grass interred, he felt well satisfied: his first house, and he took an owner’s pride, surveying the uniform, cemented yard. Just so, he labored to cement his heart.

I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced dad Sundays at The Greenwich watching the British Secret Service save the world. I thought he sent the knife inadvertently, but now I see it was code— he was boxed in without a knife to cut himself out.

My father once broke a man’s hand Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first Two fingers, so it could slash Horizontally, & with surprising grace, Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand, And, for a moment, the light held still On those vines. When it was over, My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, Lay alone in the dark, listening to music. He never mentioned it. I never understood how anyone could risk his life, Then listen to Vivaldi. Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, And stare through the wet branches of an oak In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars Again. A thin haze of them, shining And persisting. It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them. In California, that light was closer. In a California no one will ever see again, My father is beginning to die. Something Inside him is slowly taking back Every word it ever gave him. Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father Search for a lost syllable as if it might Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, The word for it, he is ashamed . . . If you can think of the mind as a place continually Visited, a whole city placed behind The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end— As when the lights go off, one by one, In a hotel at night, until at last All of the travelers will be asleep, or until Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk Is applying more lacquer to her nails, You can almost believe that the elevator, As it ascends, must open upon starlight. I stand out on the street, & do not go in. That was our agreement, at my birth. And for years I believed That what went unsaid between us became empty, And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted. I got it all wrong. I wound up believing in words the way a scientist Believes in carbon, after death. Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— Which may be all that’s left of you & me. When I left home at seventeen, I left for good. That pale haze of stars goes on & on, Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape On a black sky. It means everything It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. Cold enough to reconcile Even a father, even a son.

When I was three, a tsunami hit town. “Daddy, Daddy, save me, don’t let me drown.” He saved me and my common-type dolls. When I was sixteen, another tsunami hit town. I cried to my daddy, “Daddy, Daddy, please save me, don’t let me drown!” But he let go of my hand! I still dance to what broke on my life.

for my father 1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still —Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The God a dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh— But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn—and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus —Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.