All I Know About My Father

When someone asks Your father?
I conjure a blank, a void,
a vacant place at table, in heart,
a self-erasing memory.
Sometimes I envy poets
who sift from out their childhood days
a paradigm moment,
a passing of wisdom,
a graceless hug,
eye twinkle of reflected pride.
I try, and come up empty.

Once, in the living room,
he showed me places on a globe;
I glimpsed
in closely guarded scrapbook
a ruined, barbed-wire Europe
whose ovens had singed him.
He had a German medal.
Arbeit, it said.
He showed me the tanks,
the marching columns
in which he'd tramped,
GIs like chessmen
riding and walking
filling the map
to meet the Red chessmen,
pawns in the mine and yours
diplomacy of Yalta.
I still recall their farmboy faces,
the broken walls behind their pose.

Once we walked on a slag pile.
He hurled things angrily --
sticks, rocks and bottles -
into a quicksand pool.

I think he meant to tell me something:
There is a place that draws you to it.
There is a force that sucks you under.
There is a way to walk around it.

Days he kept books at the belching coke ovens,
debits and credits in the sulfurous air;
nights he played jazz at roadside taverns.
One night we even heard him on the radio.

I tried to play his clarinet -- just once.
He yanked it away.
Daily and nightly the man was there.
Thirteen years of a father
who wanted a room between himself and sons.
So this is all that I remember:
He was the voice who fought with my mother.
He slept on the couch, then in another house.

Years passed, birthdays and Christmases
unmarked and unremembered.
When I was seventeen he phoned the school,
said he would meet me at the top of the hill.

I walked there, wondering
what we might have to say,
what new beginnings--

Sign this, he said.
What is it?
A policy. Insurance we had
on you and your brother.
I'd like to cash it in.
I signed. The car sped off.
I never told anyone.

When someone asks Your father?
I shrug. He is an empty space,
a vacuum where no bird can fly,
a moon with no planet,
an empty galaxy
where gravity repels
and dark suns hoard their light.

Note: This poem, although written in 1993, was just published for the first time in 2011 in the Longman textbook, Literature and Gender.

True Friends

For Pierre and Jen

True friends
are those who downplay
your protestations
of seasonal depression,
drawing you out
on the shunned holiday
and its grim barrage
of hurled presents,

who ply you with roast beef
and good cheer;
good talk, too,
of all our friends
who are sliding to their ruin
save thee and me;

who, gleaning your thoughts
as moonlight glistens
on nearby snow mounds,
propose a midnight walk

through a densely-peopled place
where not one voice is caroling,
not one wine drunk reels,
and dead trees worthy
of Kaspar David Friedrich
thrust vine-clogged branch
into the lunar orb’s
eye-socket, a tramp
to the glazed and silent pond
of the North Burial Ground.

If there be Yule or Wassail,
raise cups
at Nicholas Brown’s
bilingual obelisk,
the Latin side well-lit
for night-bird reading,

or tip your cap
to the derelict women’s
Last Home on Earth
(the potter’s field
of the workhouse), or heave
the old year’s slave-chains
into the mailbox vault
of John Brown’s shattered
table-top tombstone.

Too chill for even
the flitter of bat,
the night is warm despite,
the august society
of graveyard walkers
our aristocracy.