150 Father poems

My father has a pair of shoes So beautiful to see. I want to wear my father's shoes. They are too big for me. My baby brother has a pair As cunning as can be. My feet won't go into that pair. They are too small for me. There's only one thing that I can do Till I get small or grown. If I want to have some fitting shoes I'll have to wear my own.

—Wuxi, China Walking out of the new cemetery, my father takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains of his own father and his father's two wives— his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten. He takes my hand and says,Now I can die in peace even if we didn’t get the actual bones.

After snowstorms my father shoveled the driveway where it lay open to a sweep of wind across a neighbor’s field, where the snow drifted half way down to the paved road, before snow-blowers, before pick-ups cruised the streets with THE BOSS lettered on red plows. He heated the flat shovel in the woodstove till the blade steamed, like Vulcan at his furnace removing the dross, then rubbed a hissing candle on the steel so the snow would slide unchecked as he made each toss. He marked blocks with the waxed blade, lifted and tossed, lifted and tossed again, squaring off against the snow.

On this first dark day of the year my daddy was born lo these eighty-six years ago who now has not drawn breath or held bodily mass for some ten years and still I have not got used to it. My mind can still form to that chair him whom no chair holds. Each year on this night on the brink of new circumference I stand and gaze towards him, while roads careen with drunks, and my dad who drank himself away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway to death myself. The millenium hurtles towards me, and the boy I bore who bears your fire in his limbs follows in my wake. Why can you not be reborn all tall to me? If I raise my arms here in the blind dark, why can you not reach down now to hoist me up? This heavy carcass I derive from yours is tutelage of love, and yet each year though older another notch I still cannot stand to reach you, or to emigrate from the monolithic shadow you left.

Requiem after Fauré, for my father Rest before you sleep         You’ll be walking for hours then         as usual         away from home         your shoes in your hand         your feet not yet used to the road Perhaps they need to feel the gravel to know where they’re headed A woman I knew         who lived mostly in the woods mentioned the danger in presuming to know what an animal thinks         The fox         for example stopping by her open tent and looking in I suppose she would’ve felt this way about your feet She would’ve said how could anyone know what a pair of tired feet need along the way I would’ve asked her how she knew the feet were tired         Such discourse produces nothing but anything less would be silence and that would be intolerable I wish I knew why I was telling you this It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess what a man’s about to say when he returns from the woods         head full of roots         veins more like branches         shoes in one hand         feet blistered         and none of this necessarily an indication of how the feet feel         what miles uphill and back have done to the soles and to the small bones that propel a man It’s safe now         I think         to speak for the fox who is only as cunning as we say it is We’re the only creatures that claim to be anything then build a house of facts around the claim I’ve come for vindication         No point in trying to disguise it as a lesser wish         Wake up         stop while you still know where you are         Put away your elusive country         Give your sleep a rest

My father and I lie down together. He is dead. We look up at the stars, the steady sound Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan. This is our home. I remember the work in him Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost. And I imagine the way he had fear, The ground turning dark in a rain. Now he gets up. And I dream he looks down in my eyes And watches me die.

Our father liked to play a game. He played that he was dead. He took his thick black glasses off and stretched out on the bed. He wouldn’t twitch and didn’t snore or move in any way. He didn’t even seem to breathe! We asked,Are you okay? We tickled fingers up and down his huge, pink, stinky feet— He didn’t move; he lay as still as last year’s parakeet. We pushed our fingers up his nose, and wiggled them inside— Next, we peeled his eyelids back. Are you okay? we cried. I really thought he might be dead and not just playing possum, because his eyeballs didn’t twitch when I slid my tongue across ’em. He’s dead, we sobbed—but to be sure, I jabbed him in the jewels. He rose, like Jesus, from the dead, though I don’t think Jesus drools. His right hand lashed both right and left. His left hand clutched his scrotum. And the words he yelled—I know damn well I’m way too young to quote ’em.

for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan’s neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary’s womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck’s face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like old sachel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman— the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the “brown bomber’s” crossing right of sugar ray robinson’s, lightning, cobra bite & you, there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher’s mitt hard & fast as “cool papa” bell jumping into bed before the lights went out of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come

—Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987 Rage is the language of men, layers of particulates fused. Rage is the wine father pours to the ground for men whose time has passed. Rage is gripped in the hands like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage gets stuck in the throat, suppressed. Rage is a promise kept.

On a damp June Saturday, as colorless As cellar stone, the working classes from Dun Laoghaire spread their picnic blankets, tins, And soda bread along the coastal cliffs. Two hundred feet below, the ocean knocks Debris and timber on the rock, and near The precipice, I watch a father swing His daughter out, as though to loose her on That long descent, past rookeries of gulls As intricate as mosques, through casual Alliances of mist and fog, and toward The cowlicked Irish Sea, as fathomless And bitter as their history. With each Return, the young girl cries out her delight, Then girds once more against the peril there: As though she knows no child is desired wholly; That there is not a mother, dreading birth, Who does not sometime curse her recklessness, Nor father, yoked to press or forklift truck, Who has not brooded on the chance of some Untimely accident. Pray God that such Black thoughts do not now reach like beggar’s mitts Into his mind, or better pray that he Has vowed, despite them all, not to permit His difficult and gnarled grip to give.