Poem for My Father, Who Has Less to Say Now
The two old oaks on Battery Park next to the New French Bar Café
Had died some years back, but, since there was no money in it,
No one ever took them down.
Elsewhere in this city, the city you abandoned long ago that I’m growing to know
Less each day until soon it will be altogether a different city,
Things grow at such astonishing paces. For instance,
And though I’ve asked it not to, each night at my house on the city’s outskirts,
Silence has come to perch. It watches my back and
Runs its cool eyes up my shirt.
Elsewhere a woman I am trying to fall out of love with,
So think about daily, settles into an easy chair on her sun porch to go over bills,
But, at the sharp cry from the marsh out back,
Goes silent, places the envelopes back down—
December and the pair of sandhill cranes has returned.
She watches for a moment, then turns to browse summer catalogs:
Patio furniture, concrete ducks, sundials.
In the 4th grade, Michelle Wright would challenge me to stay quiet for 15 seconds,
Then 30, 45, up to a minute,
And I did it because I was in love, thought this was love and thought
My silence would prove me worthy.
Enough of this, I want to tell you a story now, a story
Of how two people navigate from silence to noise and, on arrival,
Think themselves unbearable,
So turn back—
How that silence feels in the hand and how, when they try to share it,
It grows wings and flies into the whiteness on the boughs of a winter pine.
But I’ve said too much already.
Someone, a long time ago, believed the cranes,
When keeping sentry-duty in the night, held little stones in their claws
To ward off sleep. When they sensed danger, they made a loud cry
And dropped their stones to warn the others.
And that person told someone who told someone else
Until the story was told enough to make it true, and when my mother dies
And when you die, separately, in separate houses,
Where even the lawn ornaments want nothing to do with each other,
As you both slowly, unswervingly repossess everything you’ve ever given,
Separate is the one vow you’ll keep.
The rafters spoke it at your wedding. Your best man
Had to carry you from the banquet hall to the hotel, while,
In your unending need for company,
You had asked the bridal party out for drinks.
It’s taken old age for you to realize that the quiet at a dinner table is not
How fear creeps into a house.
But we never tried to understand each other, so we failed
At nothing. We got over courtesies long ago.
And since it’s winter, the two oaks, still bare of leaves, still standing,
Try to tell another story about what happens to the body after we disappear into story.
And this is why, finally, someone has arrived to chop them down.
