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Father
His face
is made of music,
notes of an order
I have yet to know.
The mystics
of his hands,
engraved with the timeless,
bear strange anointments.
The salt
of his touch, once known,
leaps up past
all of pain.
After God
and my father
there are no divinities.
From Vinegar Hill, A Small Red Star for Me and My Father
This appointment came when light tired, this arrangement, this syzygy
of him and me and the
still threat of a small red star standing
some time away at my
back, deeper than a grain of memory.
I am a quarter mile from him,
hard upward on this rugged rock he could
look up to if only his eyes
would agree once more, and it’s a trillion
years behind my head
or a parsec I can’t begin to imagine,
they tell me even dead perhaps,
that star. Can this be a true syzygy
if one is dead, if one is
leaning to leave this line of sight
regardless of age or
love or density or how the last piece of light
might be reflected, or refused,
if one leaves this imposition? The windows
of his room defer no light
to this night, for it is always night there,
blood and chemicals
at warfare, nerve gone, the main one
providing mirror and lethal lens,
back of the eyeball no different
than out front, but I climb
this rock to line up with another rock and him
in the deep seizure
of that stolen room, bare sepulcher,
that grotto of mind.
Today I bathed him, the chest
like an old model, boned but collapsible,
forgotten in a Detroit back
room, a shelf, a deep closet, waiting
to be crushed at the
final blow, skin of the organ but a veneer
of fatigue, the arms pried as
from a child’s drawing, the one less formidable
leg, the small testes
hanging their forgotten-glove residuum,
which had begun this
syzygy, the face closing down on bone
as if a promise had been made
toward an immaculately thin retrieval,
and, at the other
imaginable end of him, the one foot bloody
from his curse,
soured yet holier in mimicry of the near-Christ
(from Golgotha brought down and
put to bed, after god and my father
there are no divinities),
toenails coming on a darkness no sky owned,
foot bottom at its
own blood bath, at war, at the final and resolute war
with no winner.
Oh, Christ, he’s had such wars,
outer and inner, that even my hand
in warmth must overcome,
and he gums his gums and shakes his head
and says, sideways,
mouth screwed into his outlandish grin,
as much a lie as any look, as
devious, cold-fact true, “I used to do this for you,”
the dark eyes hungry to
remember, to bring back one moment
of all those times to
this time; and I cannot feel his hand linger on me,
not its calluses gone the way of
flesh or its nails thicker now than they
ever were meant to be, or
skin flaking in the silence of its dust-borne battle,
though we are both
younger than the star that’s behind us
and dead perhaps, as said; then,
in a moment, and only for a moment,
as if all is ciphered for
me and cut away, I know the failure
of that small red
star, its distillation and spend still undone,
its yawn red as yet and here with
us on the endless line only bent
by my imagination, the dead
and dying taking up both ends of me,
neither one a shadow
yet but all shadows in one, perhaps
a sort of harmless violence
sighting here across an endless known.
In Soundless Defense
Tonight the stars
Are like nails
Hammered home
On black gauze.
Eyeless, my father
Rocks upon the porch
With the music of leather
Against a softer wood.
Now and then a creak
As apt as punctuation
As he turns seeking for sound
To identify.
I know there is no sound
From stars hammered home,
No sound at all
Even in sharp listening for,
And yet he hears
The sanctuary of stars.
Night Forgery
Just before dawn
a shadow makes tracks
in the dew-lit grass.
Later, a whisper
and a scent follow
the forsaken imprints
Not a leaf stirs,
but if I watch closely,
blades of grass ease upright,
a loam granule
is released to airs
staggering under stars,
and the whisper, vague,
is familiar, perhaps stripped
from gists of old conversations.
Years ago
at a Red Sox game I
became separated from my father.
All the goblins
of young creation hung over
my hysteria, poked at my terror.
When he found me,
pawed, frayed, diminished,
he said he'd never leave me again.
This soft forging
in the night grass
is a kept word, a vow.
On My Father’s Blindness
Time whispered when he had eyes,
a deliberation of things,
songs, stories, a string of beads
some islander made in his equatorial days;
leaves, loaves, salad-making,
great roasts’ sizzling songs,
an unhurrying, yieldless time
of games, ghosts, gobs of things.
How when sentences finally came to be
he read Cappy Ricks and the Green Pea Pirates.
His eye on the page, my ear on his tongue,
caesura was a bite of beer, a drink of cheese,
turning words like the roasts he made,
savory succulent tongue,
but page wordless now.
Now! Now!
Now Time strikes!
Hurricanes, lightning, days are crunching,
night is no more a pail of stars
flung as sand on dark skies.
The eyes are closed, the mouth;
when do songs cease to sound?
Sprung from his loins wanting to be,
self-torn from his arms
at some piece of boyhood,
I now remember earless, wordless,
the touch when I was lovely young,
and I know I roam forever
in the darkness of his eyes.
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The Sugaring
My father hid his diabetes
in black shoe tops. At night
he peeled off bloody socks
where veins found short circuiting.
My mother bought white cotton
socks by the dozens, band aid
throwaways after work or Sunday
best, after his heart pumped
its way down long lean legs
deep Nicaraguan paths had known,
every baseball diamond Boston
shook under red August skies,
who-knows-what in Shanghai.
Later on it went topsy-turvy
in eyeballs' secret caves,
refracting light into bones,
porous humors going to sponge,
into space where ideas lose out.
When he sat to peel his socks
from their red-wounding rounds,
checking the salvage of the day
like a crow beside the macadam,
or thumbed a brailled king of
hearts or a diamond five
before he pegged me off the board,
I used to congratulate myself
for not saying anything to him.
He'd shuck off such words just
as he would an uncomfortable
compliment: they paid nothing,
they did nothing, they sat on the
ear like old, old promises.
Just piles of junk, he'd say,
the letter of vocabularies
and sore intentions. Even now
at cribbage or haberdashery,
seeing apod men humbled to knee,
clothesline flush with socks
as if a semaphore is working,
I remember how he crossed one
leg over the other, fingered
a sock, slowly peeled the skin
away from his angry feet,
casting off evening's surrender flag,
like an Indian,
godless,
from his coals.
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Father's Drinking Pail
In solace hours, twilight’s heaviness,
an arm’s hammer permanently halts
at its post above a half undriven nail.
Not that he was a man without faults,
is the argument I keep with myself,
knowing there are other nails left
in their half places, unheeded, slowly
standing out in late evening’s drift.
Such liquid rust they loose, shear stains
on bleached-out wood, avid as Mary’s tears,
become images, memory’s assignations;
father belting one back, Rorschach fears
that time spent on work goes unrewarded.
“It’s such small pay,” he’d say, “this pail,”
hanging his hammer up, and wired tin can
he drank from, there on half another nail.
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Headnote
My father's memory hangs on sure as a clawed
hammer on tight. His before and after is with sight and
without sight. Before came an endless trail of books and the
sound of them as he read to me, the words and lessons
singing. I was introduced to all things, the visible and
invisible. Later he taught me/caught me listening for
stars, elders whose images fade, one mythic sound in the
night where a blue stone might move. So poems come
from silence, stars, steps in a dark hall, his last reach.
