Each morning there is the awakening
and the sense of anticipation of life
and death. Then, what will one say?
I sense imminent sense, sad:`grief
that one who is loved will soon
depart
go away
but notice if you can ... the breath
smells of baby breath ... a goodbye
the best to you during grief times.

I sense a love hate relationship between the two of you, but that your father was largely oblivious to the fact that he may have had a negative affect. I also sense he lives on in you in many ways, but there is some redemption in that you've healed many (most/all) of the wounds, that you are moving on, along an exciting path, and that he's with you taking joy and finding release in it as well. Anyway, that's the story that comes to my mind.

Angelique,
It would be most inappropriate of me
to search this most personal of poems---
lovingly & starkly written with tender ambivalence
from your individual heart, to your earthly father---
for hints of collective/universal meaning.
But I'll probably end up doing it anyway...

Here is am man who habitually"ignored actuality", I'll bet...
"I will live forever!!!" (how ...comic ...
pathetic... in the strong sense of the word...
from a ravaged raw- noodly spaghetti-man!)
was his motto in life as well as death?

A man possessed of a hard dignity which was belied
oftentimes by his earthly actuality? I had such a
father. He'd bellow, "Don't talk to me about Jesus Christ, goddammit!
I AM JESUS CHRIST!"

Always that little transistor radio of his, on:
the only connection
out of his extreme solipsism.
Such static in the background,
just like the being of the man himself...
Clear ,booming, sporty voice,
encased, engulfed in...by... the static of the world.
The static won out. all was static,at the end...
except for an occasionally miraculous tuning through
of his true voice...lost again, just as quickly...

You paint a picture of a man whose body was perhaps once quite sacred to him,
but as release became imminent, relegated to slap-dash machine
status: barely held together...short-circuiting...cheap flopping choppers in a rotting mouth...

his body, once the fruit of Heaven, rotting on the vine...
(still: "i will live forever!", in contrarian voice, so typical of his spirit)

You the (finally) dutiful daughter....
planning ahead with crystal clarity as always...
contracts signed & sealed, somewhat prematurely butt
showingpractical foresight (not something you got from dad?)
remembering with sharp poetically condensed epitome
the experience of such a man as yr father as
a wild ride in the forgotten pasturelands
past pig farms...

(you can hear them squealing now, i reckon...
the pigs of long ago, conflated with the good citizens you daily have intercourse with)

In the pastures...a lunatic shepherd of a father...
the ride full of terror & excitement...he doesnt seem too concerned with the flock he was entrusted...

now you are in the driver's seat...
one last ride ...
to honor this
shabby paragon
this father...

(father=dead,long live father)
Jim. Beautiful poem.....

To live forever happens when beauty invades the poet. rAted!

"the fruit does not fall far from the proverbial tree"

Once a creature of flame, to be tamed, and be named, as immortal indeed, even in death and in deed. Fly high :) Love your poem.

peece,
dj

Robert Bly, in "Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart"...followup to the infamous (once...now forgotten except in some circles...)
"Iron John"...remember that? ...the "men's movement"? etc..

(I met him once....1990...uconn....)

"at the root our fathers connect us to a mysterious spark that flared between ancestors and two living people when we were conceived in this world...

whether the father moves closer through the efforts of love
or
disappears in some struggle,
he will always be present in the distance between one thing
and another....so...
father must be sought in the world, in the wind between things,
in whatever separates and distinguishes...
even in his own house a father presents a mystery...
we are always hunting something of our father's,
and he's hunting too,
and we're sure we'll know more of ourselves if we can get to him.
Father is absent evenin his own house....Somehow the father must be reached, touched...and we must be touched by him to fully enter life, to feel held in the world
and separate from mother
seeking that touch, that blessing fromthe father
can cause us to be passive as an infant, or as eager for risk as a youth with a burning question...
We will seek it in whatever gentleness we can find...

but we will also endure the weight of his hand
the wreck of his rage
and the bitter ring of his words
to learn his touch...

something in every father is Titanic,
ancient and huge as a cave
or the depth of the sea...soemthing ancient awakes in a man
when he becomes a father..
something that comes from those old titans at the beginning of time..."

each one returning to the house of the father
must go through the door of uncertainty;
who can foresee what knocking on the Iron Gate will call up?
Once again will he be unreachable, not really home...


or waiting, willing to sweat out the truths?

or will Saturn answer the call with a raging appetite that crushes the bones of children,
eats throught their ambitions with acid criticism,
and closes the gates again?"

Well! on a more cheerful note....the night before my father died,
the night before he fell into his final , 24 hr nap,
(how my dad loved his "nappy-naps...")
i was leaving his rehab room,
foolishluy hoping he'd make one last miraculous recovery
(he'd made 10 or 12...fucking with the drs' heads ....ha!)
i said,"gnite, dad",
feeling guilty about leaving...
he opened his eyes one last time to me and mumbled,
"thank you for all yr help today...mm hmmm"

true damn story!

you really touched me with this poe...
looking forward to the next instasllment..

jim,

Arthur: If you read "Generous Consumption" (Poem for my Father #1) you will see how acutely you penetrate into this poem and its latent "ocean of grief"...

When I found my father after 33 years, he was considered "indigent" - had lied and said "no children" (he had 4, although he only admitted to 3, having abandoned the his first son while he was still in the womb); I was aware he had been, and was being, abused by the aids (a common occurrance - I used to do social work in such places). Upon my second visit, I put photos of him up above his bed - photos of him as a 3 year old, and as a handsome young high-school grad, etc (a "trick" I had learned when working in the nursing homes) - Suddenly he was human to the aids, and the abuse "reduced" somewhat - "My, what a handsome man he was!" said in gasps - etc, etc. Yes, under the muddy moldy stinking breath was the breath of the baby....which leads me to:

James E. - I had never thought about the reality that my father once was likely very in touch with his body, and proud of his athletic prowess. He was a basketball legend in his one-room school house while a teen living on a farm; he was a strong pitcher, strong enough to be recruited by a minor-league baseball team, and he had dreams of baseball glory. How the loss of most of the tops of his fingers from a nasty tractor accident, and later, the leg (taken by a "mean tree" while on a motorcycle), and what this may have done to his already fractured sense of competence as a poetic, sensitive, guitar and banjo-playing man working in rather tough surroundings (with a father who worked in lumber, among other things - man o' the land, and a mother who understood him, but died when he was still but a lad) is something I had not once thought about - thank you for this gift.

Newton: From a "split" persepctive, one might call it "Love/Hate" - at least, how it appears in the poem(s). But appearances can be deceiving. He was more like a shadow that haunted me via his mysterious disappearance - was the perennial absence willful or accidental? Even he would not be able to answer this, and if we wrap back into our exploration of the true nature of "accidents," then my father's disappearance and 33 year absence (it was I who found him - he did not seek any of us out ) was, in a sense, as natural and unavoidable as those clouds that pass across the sun.

Mr. M and DJ: - Thank you again, to you both, for receiving these works.

James E (again): I had not read that Bly excerpt - I know "Iron John" well - I joke with my male clients that we need to help them get in touch with their "inner, hairy man" - Then I scare them by telling them they need to go to a forest and dance naked to the sounds of the drums...But on a more serious note, it is this lack of awareness of the ancestors, the lack of ritual, the lack of traditions and ways that mark our "becoming a man" or "becoming a woman" in our modern culture that leads to much developmental "stuckness," in my opinion, a certain kind of "stuckness" I do not see in cultures (tribes, indigenous, especially) that continue on with such traditions.

This excerpt also reminded me of your commenting that my father was a "lion." He hunted, and it took him away. I hunted, and eventually found him. We live on in each other, not only as father/daughter, but within the great collective "soup". I went on to do all he imagined doing, but never did. In one of his rare moments of lucidity after finding him, he said, "I'm proud of you, daughter" (in a grizzly, Jack Kerouac-kind-of-voice, with the stop and start of the beat poet's emphatic lilt).

There is so much more to say, but how to say it? I still think I got a book in me somewhere...yet only fits and bursts find there way into "here"...

The longer the association, the more gnarled and uncategorizable becomes the relationship. Yet there emerges a theme or two, in every case. Thanks for refusing to simplify.

Thank you, Dave - This is a most profound observation on your part, and I appreciate your appreciating that I seem incapable of keeping it simple - at least, not when it comes to a relationship such as this.