I guess this is a prose poem of sorts. I wrote the first draft on the evening that Luke turned seven years old.
To Luke on His Seventh Birthday
Years scurry away from us when we grow old,
but for now, for you, each one is a resplendent eon.
I would utter wise words, give sage advice:
“Enjoy these carefree days;”
however, your days are only carefree to me,
to you the admonition reeks of condescension.
If I cannot give you advice, what can I give?
Praise seems awkward - though you are the
apple of my eye, seven-year-old boys do not lend
themselves to heroic verse.
This is just the fact of the matter.
Perhaps instead I can offer something more
circumspect and modest, a meditation on generations,
of how you and I fit, how fathers and sons work
(and don’t work), how they come to be
the background against which life is framed
or painted or written, the long work
that makes me me and you you.
To start I must return to the earliest me,
the me vaguely aware of my father and his father
and the beginning of our patrimonial play.
SCENE ONE - my father never talked to his father, not the way I talked to mine.
This is why love for me requires words, conversation -
There I share-engage-embrace-feel my father and everyone,
a peculiar intimacy that drives me, unconscious, unstoppable:
Out of my grandfather’s silence I arose mouth flapping!
But you should know that I don’t know if what I saw
or thought I saw is how things actually were.
This, however, is how things usually go:
we construct ourselves from what we think we know,
which is to say what is is a matter not of the actual
but of the assumed and surmised,
the play of surfaces that accompanies being young,
the play that Freud understood and you will understand
when you see that what is is more than what you saw
which disconcerts and makes you wonder,
“Who am I, really?”
SCENE TWO - a scrawny miracle in my arms,
your exhausted mother smiles wanly
as I take you to the scale on the other side of the room
where the nurse weighs you and you are just six pounds
and I am in love, fiercely protective, miraculous, joy-fear,
astonishing love with my skinny long baby boy regardless
of how we become, because every I is a we,
a sum of yous upon which the I builds itself.
Regardless of how we become, first was love,
uncompromising, unconditional, unassailable love.
SCENE THREE - it could be any day
and you are a boy doing things boys do:
playing with something or another
and we clash because we have to go to school
or brush your teeth
or go to bed
or eat supper -
you will have none of it and strike a defiant pose, refusing to do what I ask you to do.
Sometimes, not every time, we fail to resolve this impasse,
we become entrenched and frustration overcomes me.
I raise my voice to an ugly volume, patience fails me,
you do not give in because you are just like me and before long I take something away.
You cannot stand it and burst into tears -
I recall my father in the moment when we recover,
sitting on the couch together, drying your tears -
my father who let remorse overcome him when we battled,
which I thought was silly at the time because I was over it almost as soon as it occurred,
but now I think I understand.
I do not obsess the way he did,
but I feel the pain of Adamic loss,
recall the first instance of undegraded love,
the moment before the world intruded
and it was just you and me,
your scrawny naked first moment in my arms
when I walked you to the scale with your mother smiling wanly at you and me,
when inchoate love burst through and announced itself overflowing,
catching me unaware,
waking me to its immense capacity in an instant,
a switch toggled to light an enormous room,
a space I never suspected was in me, that feels bigger than I am.
We, you and I, are creatures of the world
and so the world intrudes on this paradisiacal moment
and I could say ‘degrades’ it
because that is what my father felt
as if each hurtful thing said or conflict not avoided
took us farther and farther away from the garden,
rendered our lapsarian misery concrete.
I see how he felt this way,
but I think perhaps he erred
and maybe missed the miracle
that the primary patrimonial feeling is incorruptible,
that it is foundational, undergirding everything, speeding the recovery,
giving me the strength to release my anger,
the strength to return to you,
to the way we were before the world intruded.
And I realize the truth:
what constantly astonishes is not the fall but the return,
the redemption when love wraps around us,
when we, you and me,
return to the insuperable moment when I understood that you are mine.
SCENE FOUR - I am old, older, and you are no longer a boy.
I imagine how tall you are, how you smile, the length of your hair …
I dream that you are handsome and work magic with a soccer ball
and publish stories and essays
and are tender with your mother
and remain free of my curse of despair …
But these are my dreams,
a way to look at what might have been,
framed in the negative space of my regret.
No, I see something different, nebulous,
something that resists words and identification,
something that will not be trapped.
That something I see is you,
but the you of years hence,
a you I cannot know and over whom I cannot exercise dominion.
And this you fills me with hope and dread
because I want you to find a comfortable way,
a way that lets you live freely and without regret,
a way of success and reward, happiness and satiety …
But what I want is just that.
The only thing I know is that you are there and I am near
and still you will be who you are
despite my hope and my dread and my wishes.
So in this scene I let you go,
as my father let me go,
as my father’s father let him go.
Still, though I let you go,
I remain near always,
with love incorruptible.
SCENE FIVE - a bier.
Yes, we all die.
Who does the crowd mourn?
We, that is, you and I,
cannot see who lies atop the platform on the open plains,
under a South Dakota sky,
prairie grasses swooshing back and forth,
so many terrestrial waves sounding shh shh in the dry, perfumed air,
the smell of mortality blended with the wildflowers that the bees from the nearby apiaries use,
ashes to ashes.
A prairie rattler curls through the grass,
straw green camouflaged streak -
who lies there remains a mystery,
though we can look at this tableau and wonder
what tradition revealed this sight to us just so,
we who have no gods of new or old,
who wait in phantasmic perplexity
for the soul of this prostrate body to escape,
to reveal itself to us before it takes flight or disappears
and answer questions -
who are we? and why? why us? why now?
The drum beats slow and deep,
filling our chests with reverberated wisdom.
The careful rhythmic chanting spills over us,
flows through us narcotic-like,
dulling the space between I and now.
The tobacco smoke and the cedar smoke and the salvia smoke
lifts us closer to the sun, the sky, the infinite dome,
turns us face to face,
the delicate gray tendrils swirling together, separating, dissipating …
scents lingering after the image disappears.
And we know only one thing:
through it all stood you and I together,
swirling, separating, dissipating, lingering in incorruptible love
until we are each no more together.
No comments:
Post a Comment