Father
Recalling my father, who tried to stop the Industrial Revolution
by sticking his hand into a balky combine, thereby shedding
flesh and blood, lopping fingers into gnarled stubs.
Or, in his sixties, kneeling and hammering sheets of aluminum
into the barn roof while my mother, far below,
paced the kitchen floor, hysterically anxious.
So little alike in temperament, they reacted to circumstances
in different ways. Who could say one way was better?
But the older I get the more I value my father’s Great Stone Face,
offering to the world a resolute stoical silence.
What lesson does my father’s conduct impart to me
on days when I’m pecked to death by ducks?
I try to answer that question every day
and only wonder how he could deal with
the many troubles and labours of his life
and how he found an answer worthy of emulation:
To not grin but bear it.
Old Friends
Old friends are part of you.
They mark the time you spent.
They justify it for you.
You rejoice in them.
Eventually as old friends drop away,
and you anticipate
you’ll be an old friend who drops away,
you widen the net,
trawling old acquaintances
promoted to be friends.
You look around for more
with whom you shared the past,
at last resort to old enemies.
They, too, are part of you.
Hilltop
Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky and I hurried to the top of a nearby hill….At the summit I found a hut, where a man was killing a kid, while his son watched him – Friedrich Nietzsche
How often repeated,
to the boy it’s still a wonder,
the hilltop sacrifice,
his father’s knife stroking the throat
of the bleating, struggling animal.
The boy’s attentive eyes
see a living creature
die in front of him,
its eyes wild then fixed.
Storms are nothing to this.
Like a future parricide, he
observes how it’s done.
The ritual,
blood on an altar,
profoundly satisfies.
INDIAN LAKE REVISITED
Held round in the mind’s eye,
a paddle pulling into green dappled gold,
a sun’s span in a wrist’s turn.
The moulting year has epithets
strewn on the water,
leafy epaulettes on the taupe dock.
Rock, dock. Washed pebbles
clink and chatter. Water deeper than sky
skins the turbulence.
Leaves disembark,
waves shed engagement rings,
the lake cradles lean canoes
in its oiled cloud
bent for the shored up shadow
where last one saw the amber
tokens of the risen, fallen.
