Colleen drives me to
the nursing home;
I sit beside her, ruffling papers;
what about this one,
what about that one;
the place itself
smells of stale milk
and medicines;
a young man greets us;
this way, he says,
leads us into a room
of old folks in a semi-circle;
Colleen drifts off,
back to the car;
sony, she says,
but I hate poetry;
for a minute or more,
I stare at those haggard faces
while a gray eye or two
measures mine for nervousness;
the young man offers
to pay gas money
then leaves before I
have a chance to turn him down;
it's to be just me and the seniors;
I'm led into an ambush
with false teeth and coughing fits
in lieu of cannon;
can't read the death poems
with them so near its fabled door;
nor the love stuff,
not with all these memories
on neutral;
there's always that old
standby, nature; I just
hope inoffensive won't
offend them; but then I
look around some more; what
do these folks know from
newts and butterflies;
eventually, I stumble through
a few old favorites;
for fifteen minutes or so,
blank verse meets blank stares;
"I like the cooking lessons
better," says one woman
in her nineties; her male
counterpart snores;
I make a promise to myself
that, when I get really old,
I'll sit up, listen, take it in, respond;
Senile maybe, but I'll still be able to
appreciate a poetry reading;
even if it's mine
I remember one night we drove through
South Providence, one of those streets
like Prairie that give immediate lie
to their name, tenement and vacant lot
alternating like squares on a checker board,
like some post-war Berlin of poverty
with abandoned refrigerators sprouting
amid the weeds and three families boarded up
with flat pieces of pine nailed across their
graffiti, these houses like thieves hung
upside down on crucifixes, their Jesus
long departed his Barabbas, and while I,
cognizant of my red rag white skin
was ducking down into the steering wheel
she was bouncing out of her liberal heart
with statistics and reasons and what we
should be doing about it, and she called
this, not the ghetto, but the land of the
fatherless, as if, like the Mohicans or the
Tasmanian Aborigines I studied in school,
a whole race had been obliterated from this
planet, a people of Reggie Jackson or Jessie
Jackson lookalikes with wise eyes and black
gray hair with calming voices and an arm for
the sorriest shoulder, who could have stepped
into some black "Leave It To Beaver" as easily
as breathing, neo-saints who offered hope and
baseball tickets or trips to the zoo and a
steady income and it made me think of that
other extinct nation, my father, snatched
up by the wheels of a train when a year past
thirty and me barely born, his culture scattered
across the glistening railroad tracks
in blood, in shattered bone, in tears,
and, when I was old enough to know and feel
that absence, something else rose up in
that race's place, like it does here, though
not violent arid angry but as a sadness, harsh
and tangible as any map, as any face and body
I could run fingers down to confirm its existence,
the father that never was making his presence
felt as loud and fierce as the car engines
I never understood or the ax that I never
learned to wield thundering into bare wood
deep in the forest I never explored or the
hard grunt of rugby players that I never saw
slamming the air between them as their
muscle and bones crunched into each other
at least never saw with his giant hand
mopping up my tiny fingers in a comforting
grip or his explanation ringing in my ear
so loud, so important sounding, it had to
be the only one, my callow life having to
discover these things from myself, from
a thousand other lips, maybe all of them as accurate
as his but without the clear confidence
of it all coming from the same source, like
a beam from a lighthouse, solid, unyielding
among sinister rocks and dark water, and I
remember my first feeble attempts at tracing
this family's sorrow at the decimation of
that race, not with a gun, but with a pen,
scribbling his absence on scraps of paper,
in notebooks, before maturing into typewriters
and word-processors but that sorry history
not ripening, that sense of there always
being something missing as chilling, as frustrating,
as from the first time I broke free of my
childishness, looked into the places where I
longed to see somebody but there was nobody there,
as already, by the time of my first word written in fear,
in frustration, I was the oldest male in my family,
struggling to make sense of that, third hand
or from the ignorance of my peers or worse, backhanded,
out of feminine strangeness, and even now,
though the steel screech of locomotive brakes,
the withering cry, severing of flesh, of family,
is long confined to the deepest waters, the roots
of the coral in this unforgiving reef, I'm still
the anthropologist of love finding in photographs,
in old letters, the bones of what could have been,
wandering these desolate landscapes of poetry
with their vacant lots and their decaying tenements,
pinned by the sheer bulk of that rusty refrigerator
or despairing of those weeds that will grow in
even the deadest soil while red roses are as choosy
as fate and the windows I would look out of
if they weren't boarded up or the floorboards I
could walk across if they weren't so broken and
dangerous or, in some cases, not there at all,
and, as I drive through this neighborhood, and
she runs wild in her easy fields of sociology
and politics, she stops her crusade only to warn me
to watch out for the children, the way they
dart across these back streets like squirrels,
as if attracted by the lights, as if their lives
are meaningless and I can feel my life splitting
apart and gathering up what it can find
in this desolation to sew it back together,
crumbs of surviving love or rampant violence,
remnants of dead civilizations and the stark,
desperate attempts of another generation
to ignite that hopelessness in a flash of fire,
the echo of a bullet, a black face scalded red
and raw by circumstance or maybe too, in
a third floor apartment, with another feverish hand,
no different from mine, heading of f into words,
ideas and memories, trapped by the way these three
can pull together in meager light, on a bare
table, not to bring that lost nation back,
but to somehow scorch the celebration of their lives
into the fury of what their not being here means,
and this is no longer some alien landscape
crying out for her explanation and my nervousness
but a silhouette of what I am, somber, scary,
but pressure-packed with feeling, and the
young child who darts across the road in front
of my car doesn't look back at my intrusion
with the snarl of history, but grins, eagerly,
knowingly, as if we are allies on this sorry night,
as if he is the one like I who has
no clue where these fathers have gone,
only the will to keep looking,
the one writing his poem
in the confines of his desperation,
who would be writing this poem
in the chilly backwaters of mine,
if I was the one running
and he the one driving.
John Grey has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal with work upcoming in Poetry East and REAL.
Comments (closed)
Anonymous
2009-09-04 18:46:31
!!!
donna
2009-09-07 10:25:06
land of the fatherless--somber, scary, but pressure-packed with feeling!