June '02 [Home] Poetry Distance from the Tree

~ A ~ Father, Madonna and Child Carla E. Anderton Connections Conversation with Father Madeline Artenberg Lucky Luis Cabalquinto Unrested Thomas M. Catterson The Empire of the Stumps Toward Absolute Zero George Dickerson

Sorting the Flames Robert Klein Engler Planting a Sequoia Dana Gioia Not once did he punish me Malcolm M Gordon Your Uncle Is Dead Sunset Remembered Meditation 4 Michael Graves Stavanger Perhaps (excerpt) Adam, Son Maureen Holm Contributor Notes ~B~    ~C~

~ . ~ . ~ Father, Madonna and Child Carla E. Anderton I stole a few minutes this morning I'm not sure whom or what I stole them from Or who is keeping track or do I even care? And I was thinking…About the big A's Trying to figure out what they were, and… Most importantly…Where I could find it? Apathetic agony alcoholic absentee And I could apply, precisely, all of them to my father That alcoholic, apathetic man that has Caused me various agonies over the years…and Suddenly it came to me crystal clear The man keeping track of the aforementioned was the aforementioned Well, enough about my father… I have not seen him in a year anyway In fact, the only time he has bothered to call Was when my first cousin won his appeal Not guilty by reason of sheer lunacy and insanity He was charged with stabbing his mother multiple times Back in 1997, when my son's flesh still mingled with mine I never knew how to feel…No one ever told me How can you feel, when a son resides within you, and Eight hours away a woman bled to death From wounds inflicted by her own son? When your flesh and blood is a murderer and you know it No matter what insanity they try to pin it on You are still kin to a killer…but Then again aren't we all…really…if You take the time to examine it…well We are all related to various types of evil— I am fascinated by history, always have been Especially the really gory, bloody parts I once looked up medieval torture on the Net You can find anything there, you know I once typed in "cows fucking chickens" And I found over a thousand entries Anyway, back to my original story I was looking up medieval torture instruments Not out of any desire to use them on anyone But just in an attempt to understand…how…why Any human being could inflict that on another I never did find any answers…I suppose That hopefully I never will…Incidentally… My cousin wrote me lengthy letters from prison I never responded…What could I say? "Dear cousin, I write you this missive As my own son sleeps peacefully in the next room"? I would omit entirely my qualms That somehow all of our blood had mingled…and That there seems to be something tainted Within my genetic code…I can only hope That my fascination with violence isn't fueled By some inexplicable hereditary trait Or by years of neglect by apathetic… Absentee alcoholic father…I fear For my own son…His father is lost to him Possibly for reasons I accept blame for… I couldn't face stealing minutes away For the entirety of my life, or my son's father's I couldn't bear to steal any more time From the two of us it really belongs to ~ . ~ Connections Madeline Artenberg The ice cream cone melts down my sleeve, drips onto the Coney Island boardwalk. Passersby stop as Mother hits me, hits me, her face over mine blocking the sun, her eyes becoming another's. Later, I hide behind the big, green club-chair watching the fourteen-inch Stromberg-Carlson way past bedtime. The women's faces loom large: Joan, Betty, Lucy, Our Miss Brooks. Daddy is curled up on the living room rug in front of the television. I know I won't be caught; he'll have fallen fast asleep, still lying there when the station's signal signs off. Back in my bed, I hear his snores over the TV's hiss and from the adjoining room, Mother's grasping breath. ~ . Conversation with Father Madeline Artenberg Under the palms in the parking lot behind your condo, I'm complaining how Mother still drives me nuts. You follow with the litany, "She nags every hair on my head, counts every breath, she's going to kill me." I ask why you stay. This time instead of shrugging, you tell me, "I would've left years ago— I couldn't—we didn't do that in those days. It's too late now." Your words carve the air as your name will do a few months later on your headstone. Mother still says she tried her best. Did you ever notice the other women look at you, Daddy, with warm-gloved eyes? ~ . ~ Lucky Luis Cabalquinto I've been told that when my father learned I'd been conceived, his seventh child, he ran to the cockpit and won big with his bet on a dark-feathered cock. ~ . ~ Unrested Thomas M. Catterson (a 7-character Chinese lu-shih) Beneath this stone ignored by time's passage, it is merely a specter I seek. Possibly, that of my father, his father. Sometimes right there, I'll seek any father. I'm sitting alone above my crystalloid heritage, amid the strangled sounds of my whispers; wondering, wondering how the future will reckon, and what may scratch … my phantom back. ~ . ~ The Empire of the Stumps George Dickerson After my father had the trees cut down, After the grunting brawny men had gone, With their snarling saws and chattering chains, And carted off the branches and the logs, A stench of bleeding resin choked the air And stifled our house of rough cinderblock— A grey and crumbling monolith among The funereal figures of the stumps— Sullen survivors of the carnage there: Accusing old men, obdurate in bark, They hunkered to the ground like fabled gnomes Mourning a treasure thoughtlessly lost. And then I heard my father say, "Dig up The stumps! Root them out and you'll be a man." So that long summer of my fourteenth year I sweated in the unforgiving sun. While all my friends snuck down to the river To suckle their toes in the languid mud, I pretended to be young Hercules, Slaughtering my way through a hundred stumps. I dug and dug deep with a dented spade, Then hefted my axe and chopped at the roots; Furious at the destiny of things, I hurled my victims on a witches' pyre. My blistered heart grew callused as my hands; I cursed at my father for all my pains— Drunk or grappling with a chortling demon, He seemed indifferent to the work I'd done. During that summer of my fourteenth year, I battled manhood in the stumps' domain, But never saw a grassy field I'd won, For, soon uprooted, we moved well away. A lopped-off man in a hospital bed Clutched close and said, "Good job, the stumps," then died. And now today in my sixty-fifth year, I know the empire of the stumps still stands. Somewhere I'll find a butchered grove of trees, And pray to a father I've hardly known; I'll sharpen my spade and begin to dig: There's a field to be cleared, and loss endured. (From Selected Poems 1959-1999 (Rattapallax 2000). [Big City Lit has an inventory for prompt delivery. Order by email editors@nycBigCityLit.com] ~ . Toward Absolute Zero George Dickerson Ambushed by news That blizzarded the heart… (Hey, bartender! One more on the rocks, One more for the frost-heaved road!) What folklorist foretold a kelpie lurked Under the mirror of our skating pond— Cackling with quick-shattering ice? By a wintry subterfuge, My boyish wayfarer's feet Were grabbed, yanked down In water as frigid as all yesterdays. Shivering, I clattered out And crunched toward home, A foolish kid on awkward stilts Of pants like frozen boards— Not finding an enfolding warmth, But a father's chilly reprimand. ("This old man, he played nine, He played knick-knack on my spine.") Down the stone alps to the hospital morgue, I slid the steep steps of Lord Kelvin's scale, In the faltering degrees of my dad's demise. (Hey, Brother, let's piss in the snow— His carrot nose, his buttons of coal…! These glaciers were once his eyes.) There on the gurney he froze me out— A yellowing-purpled lump, An effigy of cryogenic space Fleering a fluorescent grimace, An object that could not have been— Not father who rode me piggyback, Whose flushed and sweating cheek Had ignited my fresh-kindled face— Not candle wax… nor flesh… not even stone. I've breathed air as fierce as fire, When fingers froze to a rifle butt And cracking ice was a sniper's shot, In nights so numb they chilled all fear, But when I kissed that inanimate brow, I plummeted toward absolute zero And discovered a loss that seemed to tear The skin from my fast-stuck lips— This was a cold too cold to bear. If matter's mostly motion and motion is heat, What stops bites the heart with icicle teeth. You can't warm a father congealed to the core, Forever a phantom glazed in the mind… How love a thing that's no thing anymore? Lord, let us forgive! Lord, let us be kind! ~ . ~ Sorting the Flames Robert Klein Engler The archaeologist of night works with moon shards. I press quicksilver between glass, collect shadows from the corners of the old house, sort and store the fossil sparks. My father comes down the hall heading for the bathroom. He's just left my mother. All oil and hair, like some fabled Noah. He tells me to get back to bed. I have seen his nakedness and it is an abomination. In the glow of the old house, in the hall that seemed magisterial in length, in the light of childhood, I see my dead father. It is his face I see now in the glass of the mirror. Mother and I watch his eyes. They trace the darkness back to where I was called from nothing. His hands sort the flames. (Prior publ.: The Sun/Father Journal) ~ . ~ Planting a Sequoia Dana Gioia All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And the sky above us stayed the dull gray Of an old year coming to an end. In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth— An olive or a fig tree—a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's orchard, A green sapling rising among the twisted apple-boughs. A promise of new fruit in other autumns. But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, Defying the practical custom of our fathers, Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord, All that remains above earth of a first-born son, A few stray atoms brought back to the elements. We will give you what we can—our labor and our soil, Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail, Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees. We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, A slender shoot against the sunset. And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, His mother's beauty ashes in the air, I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, Silently keeping the secret of your birth. (From The Gods of Winter (Graywolf 1991). Reprinted with permission of the author.) ~ . ~ Not once did he punish me Malcolm M. Gordon My father was a man I never knew. Although he was there all right— And that is true, Not barely knew—never knew. Sure—I saw him late in the evening When the day's time had run out— That never left room for the two of us And the myriad questions left wanting to talk about. Not once did he punish me, either by hand or harsh voice, But I would have welcomed both, given a choice— To get closer to the man who was, after all, my father. So my child conclusion was, after time—why even bother? That my father was a complex man Who went his own way— Was an understanding that gradually came to me, Listening to family hearsay. When I was 18, my father died— And as I remember it—I hardly cried. For me—what made his dying so sad, Was the loss of a father I never had. ~ . ~ Your Uncle Is Dead Michael Graves The phone rang. Cigar chewer, state trooper, justice of the peace, boozer, Diabetic, heart diseased speeder of country roads, With a face like Mr. Clean, is dead. Suddenly stopped. And my father Is returning again into the dark, mountainous north, That gave his drinking, fiddler father birth; My driving, driven, secret-keeping, stone-faced, Inquisitional, never grieving, emphysemic, heart-diseased, Alcoholic, skull-scarred, long fingered, long nosed, Clarinet playing, indomitable father had called to say, "Your uncle is dead." He drank like your father, That skinhead and cop. I remember he yanked me Into the shop of the barber his friend, And held me squirming until the razor Cropped the last of my hair. No matter now. He lies rigid, Who caroused and controlled In the woods, on the roads, In his house, and in his robes. And you, another runner of risks, Runner of lives, denier of both, Who ran to every army tour of duty For more than twenty years Are on the way to the town that you fled, After your father died as you held him, Resting on the side of the road, Gasping for breath, Beer in your hands, Having forgotten his inhaler, prescriptions, and cane. ~ . Sunset Remembered The glowing bath of ecstasy and clear forgetfulness      —H. Phelps Putnam What does he want That teenaged memory Who stands alone At sunset in the park Against a wall And lifts a can While the radio plays Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl," Then opens can after can And drinks until oblivion? Was it to salvage something From some wreck, something From the sun's descent each night Into the darkened bay That seems so like His father's stumbling descent Into his mother's darkened bed? The light was low and gold. The shadows long. The sun itself gold and close And then red. I wished to bathe in it. ~ . Meditation 4 Michael Graves We meditated on the war in heaven, Which Satan waged against the Lord of Life. The nun explained archangels guarded God And cast the devil to the earth, Where he had to satisfy himself, Luring into lust for power Adam's wife. The first time I hit bottom, Hallucinating snakes, I burst the bedroom door, woke my parents, And told my sire how I'd talk Into his deathbed breath, Pushing penis past his lips— I still can see his music-making piper's face, Purpled like a phallus— While we wrestled and his women called the cops: I must have known That Michael was the angel captain's name, Who saved God from the sot who limply lay In stiffened shame. ~ . ~ Stavanger, Perhaps (excerpt) Maureen Holm      . . . I knew at once you would be some      of the evil I grew up to love.  .  .  .                      * .  .  .  and next emerged on a grass verandah that gave onto a vast expanse of sea, stood weeping, gratefully familiar, though virgin to the view: medieval domkirke, half-timbered castle, stone-hewn steps to marketplace, trough      basket      drawing well, ox cart      mill      revolving wheel— surge of pagan blood memory, spokeless whirl, pre-verbal stuttering of a last renascent cell. Stavanger perhaps, perhaps Stavanger.                     *      Am I a girl, that you solicit, bellicose,      an exchange of tokens with my tribe,      claiming to have loosed my braid      from my dead father's oaken wrist?      His last rigor mortis spasm      could have collapsed your skull. (Jeg trenger min far, nå!)      My ancestral norskemenn,      long embarked from dream verandahs      to edge-of-planet peril, trans-Atlantic forestry,           who disdained the craft I used,           preying on arrogance to seduce           the makeshift honor of a landlocked, cowherd breed,      would have thatched a glaive with your mother's hair,      wrung your daddy's yodel on a seaman's oar,      then stared this gaping jury      of your lathered, peasant peerage down,      worked his trollian charm,      and enlisted every scrofulous tongue      for my immaculate compurgation.      Attacked, shall I,      barbarian by half,      not be a worthy heir?                               (Det er jenta mi, det!) ~ . Adam, Son Maureen Holm Alternating bright and pall he cast over green, misshapen foliage, veined, serrated,           inevitable comparison:           perfect pebble, reflecting slate over and over, berry-ripe, pungent-needled cadence of his speech. Alternating bright and pall, unbearable, so that where once he passed I need not go blindly, he cast. Remains of the father in the matter, even as I, Adam, have become the son in the abstract, in the abstract. (NYC, Feb '98 For Adam Merton Cooper) ~B~     ~C~    [Home]