[stylist] Poem - "Dad"

[William L Houts]

Hi Friends,

Here's a fairly recent piece; I think I wrote it last summer. Comments 
welcome, as always.


--Bill


---

Dad


I

You're featured in half-dreams,

in photos, and rueful talk of those

who knew you well.

The fishing, the drinking, the drawings

of starlike ladies, half model

half matron, medusas:

those phantoms erotic, aborning

before my conception. I clasp

those time-shards, your fractional ghost

and grieve a father in fragments.

II.

O Isaac Oedipus Hamlet all,

you mythic sons of mythic ghosts,

your fathers loomed like shadows noir,

with murder, blindness, sacrifice;

your griefs were meant to teach,

and Dad, he read you all, a scholar drunk,

and joker king. I got my chops from him,

this poet thing, these bloody stones,

and gnaw upon his drunkard bones.

III.

He died of cirrhosis, a word which

sounds better than it wears.More drama than trauma:

a divorce in progress, I remember him faintly,

a hale sunlike presence who smoked and laughed,

whose breath smelled of adult mannish things:

rum, tobacco, authority suborned

by a sodden tongue. We neither smoke nor drink,

his gay thoughtful sons, and though

we love him, this muscular ghost,

there would have been rabid scenes; tears

as hot as LA streets, and feelings as hard.

 From heartwise depths some forty years on,

I toast him high, and kiss him gone.

IV.

Then there's thatphoto of you

on that flatboat, in sun-colored shorts

and a sun hero smile.

I was never so hot.
Even now the family girls

enlarge upon your gifts, your jokes, your

sun hero smile. But that photo again:

you raise a fish to the skies, to camer'as eye,

and nothing intrudes, no scolding, no law.

The world, says that shot, is happy

with you at its center: a sportsman king

with all his gear.IN heaven you hear,

I hope, my calloused grief some four

decades on and more.It's late for tears:

we only praise your sun-brightguile,

and that lake, the way

you posed, some hero thrice foretold:

one year, one day, like gold.










-- 
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry