150 Father poems

My father was an enormous man Who believed kindness and lack of size Were nothing more than sissified Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded, His eyes were the worst kind Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard. No one could outshout him Or make bigger fists. The few Who tried got taken for bad, Beat down, their bodies slammed. I wanted to be just like him: Big man, man of the house, king. A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit, I learned to use my hands watching him Use his, pretending to slap mother When he slapped mother. He was sick. A diabetic slept Like a silent vowel inside his well-built, Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that With similar weaknesses —I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! An heir to the rhythm And tension beneath the beatings, My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Of a handheld chrome key, The noisy banging and tuning of growth.

On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line. I admired your style, but not enough to take my eyes off the bank that served as our center-field fence. Years passed, three leagues of organized ball, no few lives. I could homer into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors, and still you stressed the same technique, the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch about basics never changing, and I never learned what you were laying down. Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap, let this be the sign I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

—for Frank Espada The beer company did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans, so my father joined the picket line at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility. But the cops brandished nightsticks and handcuffs to protect the beer, and my father disappeared. In 1964, I had never tasted beer, and no one told me about the picket signs torn in two by the cops of brewery. I knew what dead was: dead was a cat overrun with parasites and dumped in the hallway incinerator. I knew my father was dead. I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy who did not hear the question in school. I sat studying his framed photograph like a mirror, my darker face. Days later, he appeared in the doorway grinning with his gilded tooth. Not dead, though I would come to learn that sometimes Puerto Ricans die in jail, with bruises no one can explain swelling their eyes shut. I would learn too that “boycott” is not a boy’s haircut, that I could sketch a picket line on the blank side of a leaflet. That day my father returned from the netherworld easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F, and the brewery cops could only watch in drunken disappointment. I searched my father’s hands for a sign of the miracle.

This is the silence around the poem of the death of my father. This is the silence before the poem. While my father was dying, the Challenger was exploding on TV Again and again. I watched it happen. In his hospital room, I followed his breath. Then it stopped. This is the silence in a poem about the dying of the father. We’re burning the earth. We’re burning the sky. Here is another silence in the middle of the poem about the immolation of the Fathers. The pyres of bodies in Saigon. The burned air The charred limbs. Ash. Rancid flames. Heat Light Fire We turn away. Here is another silence within the poem about the burial of the fire. When my father died, the rains poured down the moment I picked up the shovel of earth. I staggered under the weight of the water. Another silence please. I have always wanted to be a woman of fire. I will have to learn how to rain. Gently, I will learn how to rain. I have set fire to your green fields, May I be water to your burning lands. Please join me in this last silence at the end of the poem of fire.

I fed my father what as it turned out the future would call his last meal (tho at the time neither he nor I was required to think it that exactly)— ground chourico & chopped green pepper open-faced on a burger bun, french fries, a cupcake with icing almost chocolate in flavor—alarming, a departure from his diet of low-sodium, zeroed-out trans fats & sugar-free vegetables with high fiber- scores, suffering as he had been for years from barbarian cholesterol & geriatric diabetes (the nurse shrugged simply & said "why not?"— meaning of course that we should get it, all of us, he was going to die, and soon). A few loose chitters of ground sausage fell onto his johnnie from the fork I lifted to his mouth—they left tiny, paprika-red dots of oil on the sheer cotton, prussic red, corpuscle red like the small scabs my sister and I had left on his face while helping him shave the day before. A week earlier I had visited him at home; the day an unusually warm day in a March unusually cold. He was telling me how he'd gone out into the yard to get some sun only to return minutes later to the house, the wind far too strong— he said he worried that if the wind took his hat from his head, he might die while chasing it. I made a joke—forced to, I thought—chasing a hat, I said, that might be a better death than most, I said maybe the death certificate would read "killed by the wind." He laughed all right. You know, he said, you've really got a lousy sense of humor. Better than nothing, I guess—(did he say that, or did I think it?). Later he said . . . he'd said earlier . . . then I said . . . he said . . . I said . . . I said . . . I said . . . Say now that this might be all that's left for consolation, this might be love at the end, the confidences exchanged— all these pratfalls, & this skin chapped by a blade, and your willing servant's shaky hands, then a short trip to be washed a last, finally blameless time (so the scriptures say) in the blood of the lamb: a smell like the smell of sweetgrass burning crosswise the length of a dry plain and sent by a wind whose swiftness has in it the bright voices of kindergarteners, children born of a hardship town.

On the threshold of half a house in the Land of Israel my father stood pointing to the sides and saying: Upon these ruins one day we will build a kitchen to cook in it a Leviathan’s tail and a wild bull, upon these ruins we will build a corner for prayer to make room for a bit of holiness. My father remained on the threshold and I, my entire life, have been erecting scaffolding reaching up to the sky. Translated from the Hebrew

my father’s body is a map a record of his journey he carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh there is a hollow where it entered a protruding bump where it sleeps the doctors say it will never awaken it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping mother has her own opinions bốcùa con điên—your father is crazy as a child i wanted a scar just like my father’s bold and appalling     a mushroom explosion that said i too was at war instead i settled for a grain of rice a scar so small look closely there here between the eyes a bit to the right there on the bridge of my nose father says i was too young to remember it happened while i was sleeping leaking roof the pounding rain drop after drop after drop

Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill & now for a moment, like Sisyphus I watch it roll. I walk through the snow. I breathe the dirty East Side wind pushing past the Russian church, the scent of fish & freighters & the refinery filling the hole in my chest—how many years have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice & sat down to die. Only to look up at the geometry of sky—& stood to face whoever might need me—

In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I'm your real father, not just the almost dad arriving through random channels of divorce, you and I don't lie to one another— shrugging each other off when words get the best of us but coming full circle with wan smiles. When you hole up inside yourself, headphones and computer screen taking you away, I want to feel in ten years that if I'm still alive you'll still look at me with that same wary expectancy, your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal debating if my love for you is real. Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves that my death will one day make you enter? You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair— in thrift stores looking for your prom dress, what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes gauging with such erotic calculation your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones: no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires in a future that allows one glass of wine per shot of insulin. Will we both agree that I love you, always, no matter my love's flawed, aging partiality? My occupation now is to help you be alone.

A high school mash note’s stammering lust. Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare, and somehow graphed into that air a young man’s foolscap poem when a just, loose joinery of words was all that mattered. But then in last night’s dream, she (mother, wife, mash note’s love?) tells me a box holding secret life has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven’t heard: a wind-harp’s warp, words yarding across staves, fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes. And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave, the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens and whos, the frayed veils between death and here... I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.