Emma Bolden, "The
Sudden Death Dead Cat Elegy"
Dan Morris, "If Not for
the Courage (For Bob)"
Jack Conway, "The Dead
Watch Over Us"
Emma Bolden
The Sudden Death Dead Cat
Elegy
This is the bad poem, the one
I shouldn't write. This
is
the poem absolutely
never to write--the one
with the cat my
parents bought me
at age twelve because
a constellation of pimples lit my
face, this
the poem with that cat twelve
years later suddenly sedated
cold
cage no blanket a needle, this
the poem for the awkward
girl at
twelve who after school
scratched his scruff recited
the schoolyard
names braceface
foureyes thunderblunder. This
is the poem
waiting
to be sent back with a pink slip it
doesn't quite fit
please
consider subcription low
rate twenty five dollars, and
this
is the poem that's even worse
than that, the one with the
grandmother
in her rocking chair--yes even
that--the one with the
grandmother
who taught that sad girl I was
to knit badly, cuss badly,
who taught
her the male anatomy
from a pack of Camel cigarettes
then three weeks later died (cause
of death: sudden). And the back
row
big bangs bad glasses girl's
high school English teacher who said
if
you're gonna live then live it then
dead, him, again,
sudden. And the usual
strange romantic twist--her twin
who slipped (was
showed?) away
to blood before birth, and all
those unpoemable
questions was she
the right one wrong one she
the good or evil she
that should
have stayed or goed and was
the other the lucky to
go
sudden? With all of those
gone and sudden and even--yes,
even this far--and even
that dream with the sky
black predictably
wide as
a wide pupil, cat pupil, the wide
field below that slowly
sprouted
thos dead, who grew arms,
bloomed hands that wiped
dirt off
their eyes, who blinked
and said My goodness what
time is it and
when
did I fall asleep?
Dan Morris
If Not for the Courage (For
Bob)
Racing around from side to side
to spot my boys on the
jungle gym
as other parents read and sip,
I think I must be the perfect
father.
Last night, at his 65th birthday party,
his tipsy lover at
his side,
Mike rated my wife and I
world's best parents.
Sometimes I think it's true;
my wife and I have not seen
a movie
in four years,
for example.
These boys are so lucky.
I am so good
with them,
they literally cry when I go off to work,
even if I hardly
ever go to work,
because I feel my absence would damage them.
Plus I
would miss the beautiful changes
that occur each day (each moment
really)
in children so young.
And then I recall the famous poem by
Philip Larkin,
the one where he says, "your parents fuck you up,"
no
matter what.
How, I think, given what a great father I am,
will I
"fuck up" these kids who I love so much, and who I treat
so
well?
Perhaps, like my father, I will, as Gwendolyn Brooks says
in another
famous short poem, "die soon." Then my panic
about even the temporary
absences of my part-time version of
my full-time job
will become moot in
the face of the more permanent goodnight.
Will my boys pull on their hair
shirts as I didn't do for my dad?
His early death meant nothing as far as
I could tell at the time,
but now it has come clear that one element of
trauma is deferral.
As I fear to repeat his shortened story, I become his
mirror.
It is as if he were reappearing in my desire to be a Not Him,
but
in a funhouse that makes everything look long and thin,
garish in
distortion.
But what if I do survive past 45, the age of my father's
demise?
I take my Lipitor and baby aspirin, am a vegetarian,
and try
to walk the recommended 10,000 steps per day.
I take an anti-depressant to
relieve the stress that killed him.
As noted, I do not take work so
seriously,
for my legacy will clearly not be what I have produced on
paper
or how I have mentored in the classroom
(my father, too, was a
teacher of a kind),
but in the faces of these kids, in whose faces I see my
father.
What, then, will be my "fuck up"?
And then, from out of
nowhere
(or the spiritus mundi, as Yeats would say),
comes the image of
Jim Backus. Not in his best-known role
as Thurston Howell III on
Gilligan's Island,
but in the earlier role as James Dean's
father
in Rebel Without a Cause.
The image of Jim Backus in the
red polka dot mother's apron,
frantically picking up the remains of the tray
of food
that Jimbo has tossed on the stairwell rug. The image of
Jimbo
screaming at this weak, mealy-mouthed, womanly-man,
who is on
his knees in his pathetic apron as he reassembles
the bacon and bits of egg
and toast on the rattled platter:
"No Dad, let her see it! Let her clean it
up! Dad, why can't
you be a man? Why can't you stand up to her?"
And
then I think how retro is this image of concern.
What is so wrong with Jim
Backus in an apron?
Why should "she" have to clean it up?
Why must
definitions of gendered work and gendered clothing
remain so limited to
the 50s style of Father Knows Best,
and, retroactively, the Happy
Days of Tom Bosley's gray sweaters
and Marianne Ross's white cotton
dresses?
We know, as Frank O'Hara knew, that
James Dean was "not the
man they think I am at home"
(to quote Bernie Taupin), and we have learned
much of the secret
lives of Bob Crane and Sergei Eisenstein. Maybe if
Jimbo
would have been more ok with Jim Backus in an apron,
he would
have survived to appear as Mrs. Thurston Howell III.
For when I think about
it a bit more deeply,
was not the couple of Mr. and Mrs. Howell
III
really a couple in drag?
Maybe Jimbo would have reached the Island
by Japanese submarine,
off course since World War Two. He would have been
most welcomed
on the Island, as anyone would have been. For the
producers
had made the tragic error of setting their show ON an
Island,
thus limiting (and, in a sense, enabling) the writers to
create
plausible interactions with new guest stars,
the element necessary
to prolong a fading sitcom,
as when The Brady Bunch took the wagon to
The Grand Canyon
after the appearance of Greg with his mutton chop side
burns
and Marcia with her swelling bust still being in high school
and in
braces became absolutely impossible rather than merely
improbable.
And
so I shall wear my apron proudly, waving it high above my
head,
as did
Willaim Carlos Williams in "Danse Russe." Unlike the one
worn by Jimi
Hendrix,
I must admit my food-stained apron is a modest freak flag,
but
a sign nonetheless of a newer version of fatherhood. A sign
that I am
unafraid to get on my hands and knees,
and put my queer shoulders to
scrubbing the kitchen floor
while my wild kids
love me and hurt me as
they climb a jungle gym on a still sturdy
but aching forty-one year old back.
Jack Conway
The Dead Watch Over Us
The dead watch over us at night, coming up from the fields.
Whispers
and smoke, vapors and breeze, moving unseen.
We dream the dreams they had
once dreamed. Live lives
inside homes that they owned. Sleep in their beds.
A curtain that moves, a candle snuffed out,
a sudden chill, words
barely said.
We make our way out to the graves during the day
through
briar and brush, fallen trees leave us no path, to there and
then
back. Dark granite stones, some barely erect, record
their age, their birth
and their death. That's all that we know
from cemetery stones. We read
ancient dates, imagine
hard lives, stone walls that they built by hand still
survive.
I was a farmer, a soldier, a friend,
a husband, a
father, in a world without end.
Whispers and smoke moving up from
fields.
These are the ghosts that watch over us.
Imagining them imagining
us.
This is my house. That is my bed.
I once had a life. Now I am
dead.
Who are the ones that bear witness to you?
And who will we
then bear witness to?