-- my father, in a sense.
I wrote this a couple of years ago
when I had a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work
Center which is on Cape Cod.
And the landscape you'll hear described in this poem
is the landscape of Cape Cod.
When I was there, I had this unhealthy kind of reaction.
I had just finished graduate school
and for the first time somebody had given me some money
and said, go ahead and write.
And this had never happened before.
My reaction to this was guilt, which I don't recommend.
I think it's really unproductive and stupid.
But rather than sit around and wallow in this feeling,
I thought well, I'll try to write a poem using
some of this guilt.
And while I was being guilty, I thought
of my father and his life, and comparing it
to my own fairly privileged situation at the time.
And this is what came out of those thoughts.
Traveling Light.
Every restaurant boarded up in softwood,
bars strung with tipsy blinkers, smudge fires
against the dusk-like day.
Who could have imagined the light toppling down,
song you can see overall, or this salt
breeze, vital and teary as a drunken wake?
The kite stores ringed with stunted Christmas trees
like pathetic closed umbrellas.
This is the year we'll trim with shells.
The man who sells them tells us tales of price wars over apple
coral, fluted clams.
His hair branches and his skin hardens as he speaks.
Part baobab, part pirate.
His shells-- little bandanna prints and green turbans--
are lovely, or droll might be the word,
but tropical, not from Cape Cod.
It was 10 years ago this season my father died, leaving me
odd wisdoms concerning clip joints, Gypsies, elocution,
and traveling light.
I was 20, up to my elbows in developer acid, fixative,
a microfilm technician with few discernible skills.
What would he have made of this off season resort?
Though he never lived to see it, I can hear him say,
don't worry Al, if the poetry don't go, I'll buy you
your own beauty shop.
Yes, with sickly pink smells, well thumbed back
issues of HairDo, and a 3D religious picture that
flickered between Mary and Jesus and tricky light
revealing the Blessed Mother with a beard.
He likes scenery, Kay Francis movies, and the fights.
I guess, like you, I never really knew him.
On the last visit, I ambled to his room
with my dignified mini hiked up in the back,
flashing unintentional ass to the joyous orderlies.
Befuddled by dripping liquids, screens yielding
twitchy lights, he said, what are we doing in this car wash?
Then he thought he remembered a long ago close call
when a canvas topped jalopy broke down in a Saratoga storm.
His hands froze first, then his flesh turned dense
as a snowman's.
Only his brain kept rolling.
He knew he had no money.
But the troopers took him to a sumptuous hospital
and his eyes grew wondrous as he raved and praised the decor,
the meals, you can't imagine.
When I went to pay, the nurses said, Mr. Fulton,
it was a pleasure to take care of you,
there will be no charge.
There will be no charge for the light
or the sea's skillful flippancies with it,
for the moon softening the scene with
its own peculiar politeness.
After years of plea bargaining with a snooty muse,
I've landed here, where there's nothing I dread doing.
Gifts fall into my hands from unindicted co-conspirators
and suddenly all three faiths shine their ever loving light
on me.
I'm free to watch the dunes take on the chill color of shells,
the sea threaten and beckoned like a roof's edge,
an absent minded thing.
The way the tide rips itself out sideways,
thoughtless as a torn seam.
And people find things here, I've heard.
Portuguese dolls once encased in eerie pink and green crinolines
swish in, their mouths still red and pouting.
Here on the fragile tip of this peninsula,
anything could return.
I'm half prepared for hostile mermaids, pilot whales,
stranded miscreants clad in moss and furs.
I'm half prepared to see my father, to whom the world gave
nothing without struggle.
Rise up, beaming anyway upon it as if he never
meant to let it go.
Salt boxes appear and disappear in the slurry fog.
Gulls open against the sky like books
with blank, beautifully demanding pages.
And behind me the stolid ocean slams itself on Earth
as if to say that's final, though it isn't.
Behind me, the ocean stares down the clouds,
the little last remaining light, as if
to remind me of the nothing I will always
have to fall back on.
Thank you.