The following is the poem about my father,
which I wrote last spring.
And it follows a poem about my grandfather,
which I wrote last fall.
But I think I'll read the poem about my father.
It's called The Descent.
When I think of him, it is me.
As old pictures in boxes, old books
covered with dust and cobwebs, old hockey sticks,
baseball gloves, college manuals have been carried from house
to house and I turn them over many forgetful hours
underground.
His handwriting from how many?
30 years ago.
The eyes and the pictures straight without desire
like mine.
It is me, an outlandish clothes, long wool bathing suit,
plus for his white shoes, holding tennis racket.
Me staring fixedly at the invisible rigid camera
beside a jazzy black car with white canvas top
spoke wheels resting on dusty ground.
Somewhere 1927, Okanagan.
Highway beside rocky blasted cliff over dangerous drop
into water below.
In one family picture, he is bald,
having shaved his head for fun and the summer sunshine,
my grandmother told me.
Though she never laughed.
She would have thought it funny if she wasn't a Baptist.
[LAUGHTER]
His brother's Collie dog sitting beside him, muzzle in his hand.
Old Collie dead.
How many years?
And my grandmother.
And who knows where the picture is now.
What happens to old cars?
I remember automobile graveyards beside the highway all the way
down the coast one summer.
But I wonder what about him?
Where did he drive to?
I know he had to go out of the house to have a cigarette.
There were many verbs around that house,
and the chief among them was give thanks.
Well, I hear he drove through the snow 40
miles for a cold basketball game where you could work it out
in sharp turns, leg weary dashes up the floor.
While Lew, older, lay at home on his broken back,
painting in oils, pleasant scenes, giving thanks.
Or Jerry behind the shed, trying to roll cigarettes from Apple
leaves.
Ella cheering without knowledge when he
scored a basket from far out.
A point for us to give thanks.
An entirely masculine gesture scoring a basket.
I remember where they lived.
You had to go out of the house to have a crap sometimes
in the frozen middle of winter-- exposed girls and boys alike.
Well, when I look at the pictures,
I see me looking back, giving thanks to my 21st year
till I gave up praying.
He was a young man at college.
He got up in the dawn light, walked through frozen snow
to light the cold furnaces.
The funny feeling you get all alone
in the forbidden early part of the day.
You hear animals grunting like people
against the warmth of walls, sea birds balancing
sleepy and frazzled feathered on wires,
making the first morning slant light gray peeps and chirps.
Answers coming quietly from down the line.
It was like that summer we watched four fires together
on top of a mountain.
He cracked ice for the morning coffee
and the slippery porridge.
And birds made tentative forbidden
sounds from another part of the forest.
And sometimes, I'd find the pictures from that summer,
me stirring the growth in the pot
or him bending over an undershirt straps,
hands on knees, civilized man and whiskers
grimacing on top of a mountain, the dog somewhere yapping
at a chipmunk, tail full of birds, which
we would stop to pick out quietly while the sun got
warmer on our backs.
The tent getting near time for him
to check the other mountains for smoke.
Both of us wandering the top of our mountain
in underwear and pajamas.
With the pictures, old love letters,
magazines, college manuals, calendars with circled dates,
and the hopeless worn out pages of labor songs
that I never asked about, strange relics of the 1920s,
him alive during Dempsey and Sacco-Vanzetti times.
So did he walk in crowds, singing those things,
detach himself in thoughtful rooms, reading them?
"Oh, my darling, Nellie Gray, they have taken you away
and I'll never see my sweetheart anymore" is what I heard.
Mornings of slippers and banging stove
lids, I'd awaken to see my giant icicles still
outside the window.
And him in the kitchen, crumpling newspapers
and rattling the wood box, rolling cigarette
while the flames caught always the first time to which I
have always aspired.
Walking now to the kitchen mornings
with the same gate of bony feet slippers,
making the same first scratching sounds of morning, woman
in bed, depending, I could run a mountaintop all right.
Reading as much as I can his old books,
Huxley, Tain, Hardy, Welles, Dickens, Green, Dusty Volumes
in Dirty Boxes all signed.
How many?
35 years ago.
Thought control, Speed Writing, Mysteries of the Yoga,
Scott to the Antarctica, The Sun and His Neighbors,
Food for Thought, Western Grain Farmer, The Life Bounteous,
Fertility Cults, Among the South Sea Islanders.
Pages spiderweb together.
Bookmarks from Brandon Manitoba shops
where I pass through once looking
for designs of age in the trees, imagining freezing
walks to the basement furnaces, long hour
of warming air, waking birds, the descent
follows the ascent to wisdom as to despair.
Gave up praying as his father before him.
I don't know when, but in the pictures
he is youth leader, bent on ethics and behavior
through the world, high score on basketball team, top scholar.
Lost his finger in a buzzsaw.
Left pictures cars, church behind him.
Gave thanks.
Climb the mountain of solitude.
Spoke sometimes in short bursts of poetry,
trimming the muscles of his arm, building houses
and filling them.
Leaving the rest in the basement dusty,
and remembered behind years of worn out
shoes, where I find it all now.
It is me when I think of him.
Him, me, we.
The descent follows live again, but not as his mother told us.
He descends remembers lives again in me,
ascending from this basement into a new life.
Reborn from him from time out into the air.
Shaking off the dust like a dust rolling dog.
Free to wisdom and despair.