150 Father poems

Avocado trees on the moon.Aichigum, mullukumb, Billy Blue Gum. This is not exactly a confessional. My father’s wound was also my wound, dirt outside Vedanta Hall, blood in the dirt below the gutter pipe, blood like washing undone in my banian fold. I am not saying that blood was the thing. My father was singing. From the tall narrow barred window, the gravel driveway, in the heat, my father’s wound is jelly to the touch. I touch it now. * A broken tree on the floor. Tarzan says, “Tarzan save Vivek father wound.” “The shadow before State House, he will ride his bike no more.” Once, I looked up from paper and saw the clouds move. It was terrible, that clouds could move. The clouds moving reminded me of my father’s wound. I don’t care if you like this, * I am going to take my time. My father came back from a hernia operation, there had been a mistake, the stitches had to be removed. Every day I had seen him shaving in the bathroom, whistling Balamurali’s songs. * “If you’re going to write a poem about me,” my father says, “don’t forget to mention my daily yoga.” * There is a large glass door looking onto the pool. My father cleared that place up. Surrealism only matters if it’s real. I listen to Michael, Mr. Mister, Genesis. On Kyrie, I saw a massive bird block the sky while I blasted the song from the car stereo to the playground and the driver sat quietly. Did I mention we had a driver? He drove me around when my father had his wound and could not move. * I betrayed the wound. I see it half-formed, my mother washing him, his long painful yelps. This was scary, to hear those animal sounds. My mother went in there instead of me. Splashing. A red oval among the ripples.

We are both strong, dark, bright men, though perhaps you might not notice, finding two figures flat against the landscape like the shadowed backs of mountains. Which would not be far from wrong, for though we both have on Western clothes and he is seated on a yellow spool of emptied and forgotten telephone cable and I recline on a green aluminum lounge, we are both facing into the August sun as august as Hiroshima and the autumn. There are differences, however, if you care to discover, coming close, respectfully. You must discover the landscape as you go. Come. It is in the eyes, the face, the way we would greet you stumbling as you arrive. He is much the smooth, grass-brown slopes reaching knee-high around you as you walk; I am the cracks of cliffs and gullies, pieces of secret deep in the back of the eye. But he is still my father, and I his son. After a while, there is time to go fishing, both of us squatting on rocks in the dusk, leaving peaks and tree line responsible for light. There is a lake below, which both of us acknowledge, by facing, forward, like the sun. Ripples of fish, moon, luminous insects. Frogs, owls, crickets at their sound. Deer, raccoon, badger come down to drink. At the water's edge, the children are fishing, casting shadows from the enormous shoreline. Everything functions in the function of summer. And gradually, and not by chance, the action stops, the children hush back among rocks and also watch, with nothing to capture but dusk. There are four of us, together among others. And I am not at all certain what all this means, if it means anything, but feel with all my being that I must write this down, if I write anything. My father, his son, his grandsons, strong, serene. Night, night, night, before the following morning.

My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands— On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag. While watching Forrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend. He squeezed around my throat so tight, I thought I’d die with him.

In New York City for a conference on weed control, leaving the hotel in a cluster of horticulturalists, he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut, narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips, holds the door for the Asian woman in a miniskirt and thigh high white leather boots. She nods slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture. Neither smile, as if performing a timeless ritual, as if anticipating the loss of a son or a lover. Years later, Christmas, inexplicably he dons my mother’s auburn wig, my brother’s wire-rimmed glasses, and strikes a pose clowning with my second hand acoustic guitar. He is transformed, a working class hero and a door whispers shut, like cherry blossoms falling.

My father in the night commanding No Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips; He reads in silence. The frogs are croaking and the street lamps glow. And then my mother winds the gramophone; The Bride of Lammermoor begins to shriek— Or reads a story— About a prince, a castle, and a dragon. The moon is glittering above the hill. I stand before the gateposts of the King— So runs the story Of Thule, at midnight when the mice are still. And I have been in Thule! It has come true— The journey and the danger of the world, All that there is To bear and to enjoy, endure and do. Landscapes, seascapes ... where have I been led? The names of cities—Paris, Venice, Rome— Held out their arms. A feathered god, seductive, went ahead. Here is my house. Under a red rose tree A child is swinging; another gravely plays. They are not surprised That I am here; they were expecting me. And yet my father sits and reads in silence, My mother sheds a tear, the moon is still, And the dark wind Is murmuring that nothing ever happens. Beyond his jurisdiction as I move Do I not prove him wrong? And yet, it’s true They will not change There, on the stage of terror and of love. The actors in that playhouse always sit In fixed positions—father, mother, child With painted eyes. How sad it is to be a little puppet! Their heads are wooden. And you once pretended To understand them! Shake them as you will, They cannot speak. Do what you will, the comedy is ended. Father, why did you work? Why did you weep, Mother? Was the story so important? “Listen!” the wind Said to the children, and they fell asleep.

The last train pulses across the pane and fireflies spark beside the tracks. Acne’s red wing flames my face: I can’t take back this skin. In the other room, a drugstore Timex synchronizes with the faucet’s drip. If I squint, the fireflies align their lives to map the summer’s migraine of flowers that were weeds. You say,but I think they’re just trying to survive —

1 hat As soon as I put it on Brooklyn went dark, but when I took it off my wooden horse stared at me with dazzling glass eyes. 2 coat The shirred hem swished on the floor. Huge shoulders sloped like pines under snow. A panel in the lapel read Kuut, Tallinn in thread letters. I hid at the center behind jet buttons too round to undo. That coarse-nap wool outlasted Estonian winter but now the moths left a trellis of holes so it was never dark when I curled up hugging my knees. My mother cried out: Who are you? I answered in my deepest voice: His coat. 3 shoes I shoved my hands in and taught them to walk: now stumble, now march against your will, left, right, to the Narva front: now dance: and somewhere in that immense city where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a name.

I take my dinners alone, in my room, but I can still hear them through the door, my father’s false teeth clicking like a wooden gate with a metal latch, swinging open, swinging closed. In a water glass at night they float like an exhibit in formaldehyde of a stillborn child. The nightlight shining through the glass— a spelunker’s flashlight in an underwater cave illuminating the fossilized toothed beak of a fierce bird now extinct. My father’s false teeth, when he tries to spit in the toilet, fall in. Only my hand is small enough to reach underwater into the hole and pull them out from the pipe where they are wedged sideways, slightly open. Sometimes a woman expels from her womb something that is all hair and teeth. George Washington was said to always dine alone. His teeth were made of wood, whalebone, and mastodon ivory. My father’s false teeth, God’s first clumsy attempt at wings: two imprints of a horse’s hooves in red clay, hinged together, ringed with small square bones, too heavy to ever fly. My father’s false teeth in the click of computer keys in the tick tick of the eucalyptus outside the window as it twists out of its skin that falls on the pavement like sheets of parchment. A faraway splash in the middle of the night, I sit up in bed, startled— it was George Washington throwing something across the Delaware, not a coin, but his teeth.

Sometimes my old man’s hand flutters over his knee, flaps in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg. Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge. And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles in the air, chasing a word, then perches again on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair. Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm. Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.

Certain words give him trouble:cannibals,puzzles,sob, bosom,martyr,deteriorate,shake,astonishes,vexed,ode... These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese. Ravish means cướp đoạt;shits is like when you have to đi ỉa; mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu. For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước. Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity —” His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear. His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue. I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis. He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.” My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses. 1981 was the same year we vượt biển and came to America, where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”). “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he murmurs something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be” as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source. Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes, how could he not have been “ vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed (I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake. Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished. Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe. “There was such speed in her little body , / And such lightness in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alive because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.” Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies. Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk. Then between pp. 896-97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial(612)297-3180. Answered24hrs. When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non-working number.