150 Father poems

But prayer was not enough, after all, for my father. His last two brothers died five weeks apart. He couldn’t get to sleep, had no appetite, sat staring. Though he prayed, he could find no peace until he tried to write about his brothers, tell a story for each one: Perry’s long travail with the steamfitters’ union, which he worked for; and Harvey—here the handwriting changes, he bears down—Harvey loved his children. I discovered those few sheets of paper as I looked through my father’s old Bible on the morning of his funeral. The others in the family had seen them long ago; they had all known the story, and they told me I had not, most probably, because I am a writer, and my father was embarrassed by his effort. Yet who has seen him as I can: risen in the middle of the night, bending over the paper, working close to the heart of all greatness, he is so lost.

When my father held his Bic lighter to the nests in back of the garage, the gray paper pulp sparked then blackened. Ashes fell, coating crawling ivy and clover. A few yellowjackets fled, one or two swirled, flying into the sweaty face of my father, but most too stunned, their usual side-to-side swag of a dance, flailing in the smoke. When one landed on my arm, I stiffened. His wings settled into a still gauze, body coiled in yellow bands, the same shade as buttercups we held to our skin, cupping sunlight near our chins. Every step, careful, quivering, as if neither of us knew who was supposed to sting.

You are afraid of the dark, for which you blame the raccoons, or more to the point, your father, who took you and your mother into the night with a flashlight and shotgun, then left with both, while you held her shaking hand. You would follow your father to the end of the world, those distant birch woods where raccoons rustle and flash their green eyes. His gun was firing into the persimmon trees and the rain of leaves and ripe fruit fell farther and farther, until only the crackle of his shots and the distant baying of the hounds could be heard. The raccoons came then to hiss all around: he left you, he left you, and now you are ours.

That you, Father, are “in my mind,” some will argue, who cherish the present but flee the past. They haven’t my need to ask, What was I? Asking instead, What am I?, they see themselves bejeweled and wingèd. Because they would fly and have value, their answers are pretty but false: the fixings of facile alchemists, preferring their stones to brains. The brain, remember, is not foolproof either, and does and does until it can’t. Sodden, quivering, crossed and recrossed, the mind can become a headstone or be malice stuffed with fish. Everything changes so quickly. You who were are no longer and what I was I’m not. Am I to know myself, except as I was? The rest is catchy, self-promising, false. Oh please write to me, and tell me. I just want to be happy again. That’s what I was, happy, maybe am, you would know.

Jam jar of cigarette ends and ashes on his workbench, hammer he nailed our address to a stump with, balsa wood steamship, half-finished— is that him, waving from the stern? Well, good luck to him. Slur of sunlight filling the backyard, August’s high wattage, white blossoming, it’s a curve, it comes back.   My mother in a patio chair, leaning forward, squinting, threading her needle again, her eye lifts to the roof, to my brother, who stands and jerks his arm upward—he might be insulting the sky, but he’s only letting go a bit of green, a molded plastic soldier tied to a parachute, thin as a bread bag, it rises, it arcs against the blue—good luck to it—my sister and I below, heads tilted back as we stand in the grass, good luck to all of us, still here, still in love with it.

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees. fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees. one hundred degrees in the shade: we settle into still pools of humidity, moss- dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees. the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees. frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees. i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i : it’s part of what makes me evie :  i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

At fifty-six, having left my mother, my father buys a motorcycle. I imagine him because it is the son’s sorrowful assignment to imagine his father: there, hunched on his mount, with black boots, with bad teeth, between shifts at the mill, ripping furrows in the backroads, past barn and field and silo, past creek and rock, past the brown mare, sleek in her impertinence, never slowing until he sees the bull.   He stops, pulls his bike to the side of the road, where golden rod and clover grow, walks up to the fence, admires its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing its breath, its girth, its trampling of small wild flowers.

In the dark evening, my father and I walk down the road to the old house where my grandmother lived, and we see through the door an old woman's feet lifted up, tired, on a footstool, still in her thick stockings, the feet with legs and stockings looking just like Grandma's after bearing nine children who lived, standing, working all day, the kind of woman who made stacks of toast, platters of eggs for all of us each hot morning, did laundry, then lunch, supper, and worked with the animals or cleaning fish the rest of the day. I want to go open that door as I did so many times in the past, remembering not to slam the screen, as everyone would yell although I am now also older and finite, the seams of myself coming apart. How I wish I could go to that woman with her legs up and rub her feet, put liniment on her legs. Years have passed through the doors of that house, of memory, doors of the past and my father's eyes are sad, looking in, his own memories, not mine, thinking maybe of his mother and some of his old belongings, the stolen Colt of his own father, the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number. Her memories are unremembered, as my grandfather's, as those before them, I think of what this poem is about, only partly about memory, our many losses. And walking with my father I walk with my grandparents, among the first to be numbered: #1556, #1555.

It is the twilight blue Chevrolet, four doors with no power but the engine, whitewall tires, no padding on the dashboard, the car I drive on dates, park on dark lanes to ask for a kiss, now my hand goes along the fender, wiping every spot, the suds in the bucket, my father standing at the gate, poor and proud, tall and stout, a wise man, a man troubled by a son gone missing in the head, drag racing his only car at night, traveling with hoodlums to leave the books for street life, naming mentors the men who pack guns and knives, a son gone missing from all the biblical truth, ten talents, prophecies, burning bushes, dirty cars washed on Saturday morning. He tells me not to miss a spot, to open the hood when I'm done so he can check the oil, the vital thing like blood, blood of kinship, blood spilled in the streets of Baltimore, blood oozing from the soul of a son walking prodigal paths leading to gutters. Years later I tell him the stories of what his brother-in-law did to me, and he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye, wraps it in a white handkerchief for church, walks up the stairs with the aluminum crutch to scream at the feet of black Jesus and in these brittle years of his old age we grow deeper, talk way after midnight, peeping over the rail of his hospital bed as we wash the twilight blue Chevrolet.

Because he was 38, because this was his second job, because he had two daughters, because his hands looked like my father's, because at 7 he would walk to the furniture warehouse, unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I was fourteen and training him, because he made $3.75 an hour, because he had a wife to look in the face, because he acted like he respected me, because he was sick and would not call out I didn't blink when the water dropped from his nose into the onion's perfectly circular mouth on the Whopper Jr. I coached him through preparing. I did not blink. Tell me this didn't happen. I dare you.