Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year
October . Here in
this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer.
Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor
either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
Raymond Carver
In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel
something far off. Around the lips, a great
freshness - seductive, though there is no smile.
Under the rows of ornamental braid
on the slim Imperial officer's uniform:
the saber's basket-hilt. Both hands stay
folded upon it, going nowhere, calm
and now almost invisible, as if they
were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.
And all the rest so curtained with itself,
so cloudy, that I cannot understand
this figure as it fades into the background -
Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.
(tr. Stephen Mitchell)
"Aunt Celia"
So formal and stiff,
You sit without smiling.
As befits your time, your portraitist discouraging felicity.
This is a serious moment, your mother says,
A pose for posterity
Your wide eyes gaze upon a corner of the studio.
Who knows upon what they rest?
The cat grooming its fur?
A jumble of glass plates,
Waiting to be processed?
Your mother's entreaty to look the proper lady?
Crisp folds of lace cling to your bosom,
Painstakingly tatted by your mother.
I wonder: what became of that heavy gold locket ?
Aunt Celia,
I always heard you were a witch,
A bitter critic forever harping on your children.
You are my grandmother's sister, a beauty who
Constantly complained, carped and criticized.
They say you took to your bed,
One of those who pled poverty of health,
And it is said they should have put on your headstone,
"See? I told
you I was sick!"
Yet I have seen other pictures;
You were a beauty, you were.
Amy Metnick
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish.
Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an icebox pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to
it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a
beautiful crash
And the blocks fall, down on the people's heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloopily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.
(Gwendolyn Brooks)
Questions My Son Asked Me,
Answers I Never
Gave Him
1. Do Gorillas have birthdays?
Yes. Like the rainbow they happen,
like the
air they are not abserved.
2. Do butterflies make a noise?
The wire in
the butterfly’s tongue hums gold.
Some men
hear butterflies even in winter.
3. Are they part of our family?
They forgot
us,
Who forgot
how to fly.
4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it?
God made
the thread:
man, live
forever!
Man made
the knot:
enough is
enough.
5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone
will it go through
the wires and bite someone's ear?
I have seen
earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel.
It loves
what lasts. It does not love flesh.
It leaves a
ring of gold in the wound.
6. If I stand on my head
will the sleep
in my eye roll up into my head?
Does the
dream know its own father?
Can bread go
back to the field of its birth?
7. Can I eat a star?
Yes, with
the mouth of time
that
enjoys everything.
8. Could we xerox the moon?
This is the
first commandment:
I am the
moon, thy moon.
Thy shalt
have not other moons before thee.
9. Who invented water?
The hands
of the air, that wanted to wash each other.
10. What happens at
the end of numbers?
I see
three men running toward a field.
At the
edge of the tall grass, they turn into light.
11. Do the years
ever run out?
God
said, I will break time’s heart.
Time
ran down like an old phonograph.
It lay
flat as a carpet.
At rest
on its threads I am learning to fly.
(Nancy
Willard)
This is a poem to my son Peter
whom I have hurt a thousand times
whose large and vulnerable eyes
have glazed in pain at my ragings
thin wrists and fingers hung
boneless in despair, pale freckled back
bent in defeat, pillow soaked
by my failure to understand.
I have scarred through weakness
and impatience your frail confidence forever
because when I needed to strike
you were there to hurt and because
I thought you knew
you were beautiful and fair
your bright eyes and hair
but now I see that no one knows that
about himself, but must be told
and retold until it takes hold
because I think anything can be killed
after awhile, especially beauty
so I write this for life, for love, for
you, my oldest son Peter, age 10,
going on 11.
(Peter
Meinke)
When my mother talks about the Burn Center
she’s given to the local hospital
my hair lifts and waves like smoke
in the air around my head.
She speaks of the
beds in her name, the suspension baths and
square miles of lint, and I think of the
years with her, as a child, as if
without skin, walking around scalded
raw, first degree burns over ninety
percent of my body.
I would stick to doorways I
tried to walk through, stick to chairs as I
tried to rise, pieces of my flesh
tearing off easily as
well-done pork, and no one gave me
a strip of gauze, or a pat of butter to
melt on my crackling side, but when I would
cry out she would hold me to her
hot griddle, when my scorched head stank she would
draw me deeper into the burning
room of her life. So
when whe talks about her
Burn Center, I think of a child
who will come there, float in water
murky as tears, dangle suspended in a
tub of ointment, suck ice while they
put out all the tiny subsidiary
flames in the hair near the brain, and I say
Let her sleep as long as it takes, let her walk out
without a scar, without a single mark to
honor the power of fire.
(Sharon Olds)
There was a
man who found two leaves and came indoors holding
them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they
said then go into the yard and do not grow in the
living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was
fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But his
parents said look it is fall.
(Russell Edson)
There was an old
man who had a kite for a son, which he would let up
into the air attached to a string, when he had need to be
alone.
. . . And would
watch this high bloom of himself, as something
distant that will be close again.
(Russell Edson)
My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars,
the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
"Are you happy?" I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father's voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since.
He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness that hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am there among the stars,
as tall as he. Are
you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing,
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.
(Philip Levine)
What goes on
in your gray matter
is beyond me.
It must always
be snowing
there, in your head.
Behind your eyes,
I know it is the worst
winter in years.
There, in your head,
in the drifts,
a thousand struck matches
cannot make you
warm. I
am one of those
matches,
so I know.
One day, the snow
will pile up too high.
Even the headlines
won't be able
to find you.
That day,
I shall rush out
from my books,
naked, illiterate,
tearing to pieces
my library card,
crying, Mama! Mama!
today, I will
play basketball!
Today, I will
give you my
gym shorts to wash!
Today, I will even forget
to marry my wife!
(Stanley Kiesel)
Surely I know that
my voice has grown small in his house,
drawn thin by the wire,
a fly's whine in the clutter of breakfast,
a thin line of ants
winding out of a crack in the past
toward the sweet, impossible cup of his ear.
In the background, my former wife is whispering.
I clutch at the phone like a hand held down.
It grows more difficult for me
to crawl into the hot cardboard fort of his love
simply by calling on Sundays.
(Ted Kooser)
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf.
Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
(Rita Dove)
When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they'll plunge in the deep end, she'll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool.
When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she'll be doing her
wild multiplying, as the drops
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
(Sharon Olds)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
(Robert Hayden)
My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.
I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What
I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.
I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I am helpless
to spare my son.
(Louise Gluck)