Our neighbors cut down their big white pine, the
one the kids made a lair with when the snow was particularly heavy. So if you’d
drive up the street you’d look at our house and say something was new, and not
in a good way. The garden I’d planted with shade-loving plants is now in full
sun, and I’d be asking your advice on that.
There are things I know now, because I'm a
mother of a son, that I didn’t know when you left. Like, the difference between
a blue and gray shark, the mysteries of his trendy new toys, the sadness of
discovering the robot you gave him was gone for good because the batteries
leaked when he left it alone for too long.
Most poets eventually do their dead-father
poems, but I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want this topic to be mine.
Most poets didn’t keep the buckeyes their fathers would give them for no reason
on a walk, most now-dead fathers didn’t give such buckeyes, but I don’t want something
that true to become a charming detail like a thousand others. I wanted to find
a buckeye to put on your grave when I visited, but I didn’t want to leave the
one I could find in a hurry, what if it were the last one that truly came from
you?
And it is your birthday but not really anymore,
it wasn’t your birthday before you were born and now what is it?
This is the kind of giant pain I used to bring
to you, this missing you, and that comfort is now a hammock and one tree.
But yes we never had to have the
give-me-your-keys talk, and you never used a cane, and you didn’t have to watch
the recession, or the handful of times I despaired about work, but you would’ve
loved some of my new projects and been proud at how hard I’ve worked on them.
And Aunt Elza’s gone, Ma read about her best
friend’s death in the Star Ledger. And Jean and Art and Stan and John, all
since you went.
I am so sorry about the typo in your obit. I was
thinking CB’s as in Construction Battalion, but of course it was Seabees, I knew
that. I knew that. Maybe it wouldn’t’ve bothered you, as your spelling wasn’t
the best, but your daughter should’ve known better. I was so shot that day.
And I flushed your nitroglycerin pills down the
toilet, the little brown glass vial, and how I hated seeing them come out of
your pocket, I flushed that hatred, too. I loved them for helping you; hated
your need of those only explosives in my quiet childhood.
And I had to move the seat up in the pickup
before I could drive it here. Permanent subtraction, from six-foot-four to
five-foot-seven.
When I’d come home from college, we’d take a
walk up the woods road, to see what trees you’d cut into firewood, to plan what
deadfalls you’d take next. The red and plaid hunter’s jacket, the trueness of
old fashioned things -- I was always so glad you had made it to the next
season.
I miss loving someone that way.
I would like to share a poem on a similar topic from David Corcoran, a poet and colleague whose poetry and journalism I admire:
Here
Underneath all this —
underneath the broken
branches, pale twigs, blown
leaves, rotting
acorns, the gray mud alive
with colonies of beetles,
millipedes, spiderlings,
larvae in all their tiny
shapes
and sizes, above the brittle
sandstone crust
that
holds all this up — is the accident’s
imperceptible
scour.
That
night, fifty years ago,
the car spun off the highway, pirouetting
(as I imagine) gracefully, swaying and toppling
as it cleared the guardrail, scattering squirrels
and groundbirds, the door opening in midflight
and pitching him out, the belly of the roof
coming to rest on him.
The
night was cold,
twigs and bits of snow dug into his bare neck,
and as rescuers strained to lift the car away,
he lay here (wishing he could help) and saw
the last things he saw: blue-black sky,
pinpoint stars, night pines, tall oaks,
shadowy branches swaying in the wind.
