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Father Movies


In the movie the Angus cows
shuffle and shake off flies;
geese swim the pond,
half silted in now
and floating a rug of scum.
Pigs face a water hose
in the brown sun
drinking and grinning
while seven kids dance
dressed in mud near the father.
 
My father owned their farm,
but who could own a burning house,
a spume of ice
where hosewater hit the stones and froze?
They wrapped themselves in blankets,
that other family,
squinted in the snow
at blinking firetrucks.
Then they were gone
further into the white valley.
 
But those charred timbers,
bulldozed into the cellar,
rise again,
with their rolling floors,
while the mother
steers a tractor through the field
so that her husband,
home from a night job,
can sleep.
 
And my father
owned this palomino
taking the weathered fence
in slow motion,
these spaniels nipping
sled-runners on blue ice,
He owned our afternoons
stretching wire pole to pole
in knee-deep yellow grass,
or loafing in the loft
shooting the gray shadows
of pigeon and mouse.
 
Where is their beagle
tied to the porch,
or their lone Holstein, Snowball,
snuffing bare bellies
for another taste of salt?
Where is the overdue rent
passing hands,
or the rotted silo
on its way down,
or the whole brown field lit
and moving toward the pond?
 
My father shot everything
he wanted, and left out nothing
of the wind bending alfalfa
into green breakers,
or the willow that leans over water.
In the distance a car, old even then,
glints beneath a rearing horse.
 
--Originally published in Magic Shows.  Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1986.
 
  
 
Ducks in a Row
 
 
"It's terrible," he says, "when this. . . thing
happens to your . . . brain."  I look at this man
who hired me for my job all those years ago.
I seem to be interviewing him now.  And yes,
he looks terrible, tired and watery-eyed,
a pleading in his face that can't be satisfied.
Terrible, I agree.  And then he says it again.
"It's just terrible."  I can see he's not repeating.
He's just thought of it.  So I agree, again.
And he looks like a scolded dog, wipes his face
with one hand, and just looks at me straight
for a long moment.  "If I could just get
my ducks in a row. . ." he begins, and I wait.
In ten seconds, twenty, I admit to myself
that the sentence will never end.  Terrible,
I practically whisper, and now he looks
as if he's never thought of it that way before,
but it's true.  "I just want. . ." he then says,
and I wait.  I wait.  "You've always been
such a great friend to me," he says, and
I say the same back.  But I can tell there's more.
He may have practiced his speech
before entering my office.  But it's dissolving
in his mouth like a sugar cube.  "I don't know. . .
what . . .  I need to do," he insists.  So I tell him
we've got everything covered, but that's not
what he means.  I just listen then to the hiss
of the radiator.  "I don't know if I told you,"
he says in a sad, wandery tone.  And so
I say no, I don't believe you have. . . .