Showing posts with label father. Show all posts
Showing posts with label father. Show all posts

9/16/23

After We Saw What There Was to See - Lawrence Raab

 

After we saw what there was to see

we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father

waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need

a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.

Why do you want so much stuff?

he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear

my mother saying, as if that took care of it.

 

After she died I don’t think he felt any reason

to go back through all those postcards, not to mention

the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower

and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays

and Lucite paperweights, everything we carried home

and found a place for, then put away

in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.

 

He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,

and when she was gone—why should that change?

Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?

I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler

in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,

Lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.

12/31/22

FOR SOME A MOUNTAIN - Stephen Dunn

For some a mountain, say an Everest or a Kilimanjaro,

exists to be conquered, the kind of obvious big thing

my father, that valley dweller, would casually diminish.

What’s wrong with life in the lowlands, he’d say,

why not just look up, enjoy imagining

how you’d feel at the top? And interesting people,

if you need them, are everywhere. They can be found

in a glade or a clearing, even in a suburb.

 

My father is dead; he only has the words I remember

and choose to give him.

 

If I were to say my need to define myself

involves breathing air not many have taken in,

and the excitement of a little danger, I’d hear him say

Do some good work, mow the lawn, carry wood

from the woodpile. Don’t confuse the dangerous

with the heroic.

 

But the truth is I’d like to be a mountainizer,

someone who earns the pleasure of his reputation.

When it comes to women, I desire them married

to their own sense of accomplishment, each of us

going our own way, coming together when we can.

 

Not enough, he says. If they lack generosity

they take back what they give. If they have it

they remind you, ever so gently, that a man

who climbs mountains leaves behind his beloved.

 

It is impossible to win arguments with the dead.

 

Everywhere you go there’s danger of being a no one,

my father insists. Is he changing his position,

or is that willful me changing it for my sake?

The grave was always his destination, the modesty

of his ambition obscured now by lichen and moss.

Comes the mountain before the reputation, I say.

Comes the unsure footing, the likely fall, he says.

10/31/18

The Sign of Saturn - Sharon Olds

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an
amber black look, like my father
about to pass out from disgust, and I remember
she was born under the sign of Saturn,
the father who ate his children. Sometimes
the dark, silent back of her head
reminds me of him unconscious on the couch
every night, his face turned away.
Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother
with that coldness that passed for reason in him,
that anger hardened by will, and when she rages
into her room, and slams the door,
I can see his vast blank back
when he passed out to get away from us
and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,
to coal. Sometimes I see that coal
ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,
trying to persuade her toward the human, her little
clear face tilts as if she can
not hear me, as if she were listening
to the blood in her own ear, instead,
her grandfather’s voice.

10/5/18

1988 - Andrea Gibson

It was the year your mother
put her cigarette out on your arm.
The year you forgave her so hard
you stopped crying for good.

I was on the other side of the world
watching my father shine his knives.
I was trying to get the nerve to tell him
who to kill.

But he never figured out
there was someone to kill.
Collected knives like art
and hung them on our walls.

That autumn I made a person
by stuffing a pile of dead leaves
into an old pair of clothes.
Maybe you did too. Maybe

you found a pumpkin for a head
and dug it hollow with your hands.

Friend, if memories had been seeds
we could have chosen not to plant
do you think we would have ever found each other?

Do you believe in the magnet of scars? I believe

people who have been through hell
will build their love from the still burning coals.

Our friendship is a well-heated home
where we always agree on what is art

and what is something to sharpen
and hold in our ready hands.

10/3/18

VOLUNTARY - JR Walsh

My little sister said why a lot. Why this? Why that? Why everything.
My father said, Stop trying to answer every question every time.
So I said, She wants to know why so I’m telling her.

My father said, She doesn’t care. It’s involuntary.
She’s two years old and wants you to talk to her.
I’m tired of both of you. 

I didn’t ask why. 

My father left for work.
My sister wanted to know why.
So I said, To get away from you.

Then my mother said, Why’s your sister crying?
I didn’t answer why.
Maybe my father was right.

3/5/18

a wild, fresh wind blowing... - Charles Bukowski


I should not have blamed only my father, but,
he was the first to introduce me to
raw and stupid hatred.
he was really best at it: anything and everything made him
mad—things of the slightest consequence brought his hatred quickly
to the surface
and I seemed to be the main source of his
irritation.
I did not fear him
but his rages made me ill at heart
for he was most of my world then
and it was a world of horror but I should not have blamed only
my father
for when I left that... home... I found his counterparts
everywhere: my father was only a small part of the
whole, though he was the best at hatred
I was ever to meet.
but others were very good at it too: some of the
foremen, some of the street bums, some of the women
I was to live with,
most of the women, were gifted at
hating—blaming my voice, my actions, my presence
blaming me
for what they, in retrospect, had failed
at.
I was simply the target of their discontent
and in some real sense
they blamed me
for not being able to rouse them
out of a failed past; what they didn't consider was
that I had my troubles too—most of them caused by
simply living with them.
I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even
stupidly happy almost without cause
and left alone I am mostly content.

but I've lived so often and so long with this hatred
that
my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from
them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where—
some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee
is in comparison
like a fresh wild wind blowing.

10/2/16

Walking Around With A Broken Umbrella - Noor Hindi

Because sneezing my emotions onto the fibers of your
Kleenex isn’t working, I’ve spent my days punching

mailboxes, and taking victory laps around childhood
graveyards. I know you think I resemble a Sour Patch

Kid, that my thoughts are just silly string. Maybe my
brain twitches too much and maybe I was born inside

of a teardrop. I’m all passion. But to me, you are the sun
and I’m hanging my thoughts on a clothesline for you.

If I told you to disentangle our straw house, if I told you
that I feel like a puddle that is gliding towards a sewer,

what would you say? If I asked you to set fire to the world
using only the warmth of our hands, would you do it?

                                                   *

Yesterday, I became so angry that I ate a quesadilla. Then I
smashed my desk with a snow globe. I once cried for three

days about a purple butterfly kite that refused to fly. Weeks
later, I sobbed at our toaster for burning my optimism,

and when you called me unstable, I kicked our floor pantry
just to prove you right. It was inevitable. You would spit me

out as if I was a watermelon seed. You would ask me three
times a day how I felt about broken backspaces, but my eyes

were already decomposing. Days expired. I was the rotting Jack
O’ Lantern left outside our door. Every time you told me a

truth, I used a magnifying glass to find all of your potholed
lies. Eventually, I fell silent watching the image of you,

dad, melt like the icicles that later formed on our house
gutters. I tried to hold them once, but they only burned my hands.

2/8/16

Mirror Image - Louise Glück

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother's voice couldn't make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can't love another human being
you have no place in the world.

oh, yes - Charles Bukowski

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.

My Father - Yehuda Amichai

The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits
out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands
overflowed with good deeds.

12/30/15

Telemachus' Kindness - Louise Glück

When I was younger I felt
sorry for myself
compulsively; in practical terms,
I had no father; my mother
lived at her loom hypothesizing
her husband's erotic life; gradually
I realized no child on that island had
a different story; my trials
were the general rule, common
to all of us, a bond
among us, therefore
with humanity: what
a life my mother had, without
compassion for my father's
suffering, for a soul
ardent by nature, thus
ravaged by choice, nor had my father
any sense of her courage, subtly
expressed as inaction, being
himself prone to dramatizing,
to acting out: I found
I could share these perceptions
with my closest friends, as they shared
theirs with me, to test them,
to refine them: as a grown man
I can look at my parents
impartially and pity them both: I hope
always to be able to pity them.

Telemachus' Guilt - Louise Glück

Patience of the sort my mother
practiced on my father
(which in his self-
absorption he mistook
for tribute though it was in fact
a species of rage--didn't he
ever wonder why he was
so blocked in expressing
his native abandon?): it infected
my childhood. Patiently
she fed me; patiently
she supervised the kindly
slaves who attended me, regardless
of my behavior, an assumption
I tested with increasing
violence. It seemed clear to me
that from her perspective
I didn't exist, since
my actions had
no power to disturb her: I was
the envy of my playmates.
In the decades that followed
I was proud of my father
for staying away
even if he stayed away for
the wrong reasons;
I used to smile
when my mother wept.
I hope now she could
forgive that cruelty; I hope
she understood how like
her own coldness it was,
a means of remaining
separate from what
one loves deeply.

Telemachus' Detachment - Louise Glück

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.

12/11/15

Father's Old Blue Cardigan - Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

12/10/15

Those Winter Sundays - Robert Hayden

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?