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.

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.

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.

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.