the other best Father’s Day poem

There are dozens of great ones, actually. Someone should put together an anthology. William Stafford alone probably wrote an anthology’s worth. I’d certainly nominate “With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach” for inclusion, along with “The Rescued Year” and this little, exquisitely cut gem:

The Swerve

Halfway across a bridge one night
my father’s car went blind. He guided
it on by no star but a light he kept in mind.

Halfway to here, my father died.
He looked at me. He closed his eyes.
The world stayed still. Today I hold in mind

the things he said, my children’s lives—
any light. Oh, any light.

the best Father’s Day poem

It’s “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, of course:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

I love this poem for its efficiencies — how much it lets me know without telling me. I know that the father got up early every day because the word “too” is word two in the poem. I know they’re headed to church because of the polished good shoes. Before I hear about the “chronic angers of that house,” I feel them in the sharp consonants of “blueblack” and “cracked” and “ached” and “breaking.” And I know that the father is dead now, because the line “No one ever thanked him” wouldn’t really be possible if he weren’t — to say nothing of the poem’s sense of regret and its merciless self-excoriation. We all know that the father is dead, don’t we? That’s what makes the poem so necessary, so desperate. And then there’s that devastating final couplet. If you want to talk about how one word can say many things, consider some of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of “office”: “a position of authority to exercise a public function and to receive whatever emoluments may belong to it”; “a position of responsibility…”; “a prescribed form or service of worship”; “a religious or social ceremonial observance”; “something that one ought to do or must do”; “an assigned or assumed duty, task, or role”; “something done for another.”

“Or gallop for what must be joy”

All the fuss about American Pharoah [sic] got me thinking about my two favorite race-horse poems. Philip Larkin’s is well-loved and David Hayward’s is obscure (I had to buy a used copy of a 2001 anthology of sports poems in order to read it again), but they have a lot in common: interestingly, they’re both composed of thirty lines arranged in six-line stanzas; they’re both beautifully bittersweet; and they both, in their final lines, use the word “must” movingly and a little bit recklessly. I remember great poems for the same reason I remember great races: their finish.

 

At Grass

By Philip Larkin

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
— The other seeming to look on —
And stands anonymous again.

Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes —

Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass: then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries —
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

 

***

 

To the Man Saying “Come on Seis” at Hollywood Park

By David Hayward

All the great jockeys were born premature.
Willie Shoemaker spent his first nights in a shoebox incubator
in his grandmother’s oven. He weighed two pounds,
and two years after retiring from the one job
in which an ambulance follows you as you work,
he was paralyzed in a car accident. Terrible

the little gussied-up bodies and terrible for anyone
to want a lawn jockey of his own, with no designs
on any oval, no horse even. At the Silk Hat
arcade in Tokyo, though, to project one’s wishes
onto a tiny plastic white man,
of a piece with his horse and nodding

in his groove to the finish, is to see
the whole world, pylon and Creamsicle,
abbreviated in him. Bee Nun (who, like the other horses,
is all name) comes in at 40 to 1 and the slot gushes tokens
all the doo-dah day, a thousand gentleman
rabbits in coin, eager for use

but redeemable for other tokens only. A closed circuit,
then, unbeautiful as the system of condensation
and rain, with nothing left over, no blanket
of losing tickets over which to walk home, as this man
and I did, done with our words, “Come on Seis,” “Five.
Oh Five. Five,” which were not prayer but “I chose this.”

When we both walked out empty-handed,
our money come to what it really was,
the world — a parking lot littered with wet,
unwanted souvenir clocks — looked to me
the way wreaths of red carnations
must look to the horse who’s won them.

“that birdless city”

Since moving to Lawrence about a year ago, I’ve been reminded that in every part of Kansas that isn’t Topeka, “Topeka” is a metonym for state government — like “Washington” at the national level. To put in another way, people in Lawrence say “Topeka” the way they might say “tick season” or “gastroenteritis.”

It’s hard to hear your hometown reduced to a byword, a pejorative, or a punchline, even when there are people in your hometown working hard to make it all of those things. I complain about Topeka all the time, but I get defensive when other people do. Topeka is like a family member to me.

A couple of weeks ago I got to hear Jamaal May read this terrific little poem. Someone needs to write a poem that does for Topeka what Jamaal’s does for Detroit — gives it back its birds.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s birthday

Gwendolyn Brooks would have been 98 today. Topeka poets, let’s get to thinking about how we want to celebrate her centenary in 2017.  Some local and universal facts about her:

1. The house she was born in, on North Kansas Avenue, was destroyed in the flood of 1951, a year after she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize.

2. Her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, taught for a while at Monroe Elementary School, which is now the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

3. Although her family moved to Chicago — part of the Great Migration — when Gwendolyn was only a few weeks old, they visited Topeka often during her childhood. Many of her cousins still live in the city.

4. Topeka named a park for her, at 37th and Topeka, in 1996. She was on hand for its dedication.

5. The music she could make with language was astonishing. Here’s the first sonnet from the sequence “The Children of the Poor”:

People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.
And when wide world is bitten and bewarred
They perish purely, waving their spirits hence
Without a trace of grace or of offense
To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.
While through a throttling dark we others hear
The little lifting helplessness, the queer
Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous
Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.
And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of
The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.

“in this in-between time and in-between season…”

Here’s the best early-summer poem I know. What are other good ones?

 

 

Metropolitan Twilight

Joe Bolton

 

Mid-May: day warm but cooling down

As afternoon ripens past ripeness

And shadows increase their claim.

Through any window you happen

To look out of, the world is

Lush with the contrived imagery

Of shrub and thick grass, pine and palm,

While beyond it all the blue

Of the bare sky goes deep

With anticipation of stars.

 

Down the block, the last lawnmower

Chortles out, and children disappear

Into the sound of their own shouts.

A woman shakes out a sheet

And drapes it over a cord

Where it billows alive in breeze.

Otherwise the scene is ghostless,

Or ghosted only with a promise

Having nothing to do with the past.

For there’s no place here for the past—

 

Not with winter seeming so far away,

And summer heavy in the held breath

Of the world’s various green,

And the huge planes passing over

Now, and now, and the passengers

Beginning to undo their seatbelts

And order cocktails, their thoughts

Most surely hundreds of miles

Ahead of them: of summer,

Of lovers in other cities.

 

And there’s no telling what might

Be happening now behind the sun-

Struck windows of the eight-story

Apartment building up the street,

Nor in the topmost towerings

Of skyscrapers downtown,

The southwest sides of which

The late light has, touching, turned

To gold. Watching, you wouldn’t have

Thought it possible that the world

 

Could go on transforming this way

Its already perfected self,

Or that the moment, turned inward, might

Yield such inklings of the eternal.

And it is like this. And it is

Like this till, of a sudden,

Sky’s blue and world’s green meld

In marine light, and all along

The avenues the streetlamps

Flicker on, making incandescent

 

Globes of silver for moths

To flutter through, and in the un-

Prepared-for return to the self,

You are sad for you couldn’t say

What reason. And in this in-

Between time and in-between season,

The heart cries out for what it dreams

It has lost. It is the hour

When a man might decide to rise

And walk to the corner store

 

For an evening newspaper,

But stops on the sidewalk and turns.

He sees the house he’s lived in all

These years and, through the window,

His wife reading in lamplight,

And wonders, perhaps, how his life

Came to happen to him this way,

And what it’s meant, and how much

Longer it will be before his body

Fails, or his wife’s body fails,

 

And the dream they both always knew

The ending of comes finally true.

And turns again, and walks, hands

Clutching the familiar contents

Of his pockets. He sees one jet

Winking westward, the first star

Pulsing on. And through the tangled

Fingers of some trees, the moon, for him,

Is a bright, magnificent coin

That can’t be spent in this world.

The Poet in Topeka

I’m by no means the poet in Topeka. Topeka produces a ridiculous number of poets. Dennis Etzel Jr., a Topeka poet, has put together a list of them, and it’s growing all the time. I’m only half-joking when I say that it’s my dream to be remembered as the seventh-best Topeka poet of my generation.

To be a poet from Topeka is to be asked, frequently, “Why so many poets from Topeka?” I don’t really have an answer — only a question of my own: Can you think of another American place name that contains the word “poet”? I can’t.

Okay, I can: Port Townsend. But I think all cities with “Port” in their names should be excluded from the conversation because they’re cheating.

In any case, this is my new blog. It’ll be a lot of poetry, a lot of Kansas, a lot of Kansas poetry, and probably, knowing me, some funny stuff my kids said. Please enjoy, share, and comment.

P.S. At present I am living in Lawrence.