My parents buried two of their children--my brother, Kevin, and my sister, Sally--and it broke them. Literally. I don't think they ever really recovered from those losses. I would sometimes find my dad sitting at the dining room table, just staring their graduation pictures on the wall. Perhaps the one good thing about my mother's dementia was that she didn't have to live with the memory of their deaths every day.
Sharon Olds writes her daughter . . .
For My Daughter
by: Sharon Olds
That night will come. Somewhere someone will be
entering you, his body riding
under your white body, dividing
your blood from your skin, your dark, liquid
eyes open or closed, the slipping
silken hair of your head fine
as water poured at night, the delicate
threads between your legs curled
like stitches broken. The center of your body
will tear open, as a woman will rip the
seam of her skirt so she can run. It will happen,
and when it happens I will be right here
in bed with your father, as when you learned to read
you would go off and read in your room
as I read in mine, versions of the story
that changes in the telling, the story of the river.
Olds is pretty pragmatic in this poem. She knows her daughter is going to grow up, venture out into the world, have sex. It's a part of becoming an adult for most people. We replace the unconditional love of mothers and fathers with the affections/attentions of a significant other. It's an old story--as Olds says, "the story of the river."
I hope I never have to experience what my parents did. In fact, I don't even want to contemplate the possibility. My daughter has become a loving, caring, beautiful young woman. She lives with her significant other, and I can definitely feel the shift in our relationship. She's not quite the same little girl who used to fall asleep on my chest watching Frosty the Snowman every afternoon after preschool.
But I would still sacrifice everything for her, up to and including my own life. As long as there's breath in my lungs, I will do whatever I can to keep both of my children from harm. I believe that's part of the father job description: "Must be willing to forfeit health and happiness for offspring."
My dad, even though he wasn't really physically affectionate, would do anything for me. I know that. For years, he rode his riding lawnmower up to my house and cut my lawn for me. (He did this well into his 80s.) If I had a plumbing issue, I would call him, and he'd come over and fix it. He came to all of my poetry readings, and, when I was named U.P. Poet Laureate, I've never seen him so happy for me. It was one of the few times he hugged me and said, "I'm proud of you."
I loved my dad, even though he sometimes made that love very difficult. Yet, as Robert Hayden says at the end of his great poem "Those Winter Sundays"--"What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices."
Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about those lonely offices of fatherhood, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Start by making a list of memories you associate with winter. Describe your childhood sled or saucer, your favorite skating pond or tobogganing hill. Did you go on ski vacations, or was winter more a time for hunkering down in a warm house? What does winter smell like? Taste like? Describe your favorite winter outfit. Take these memory snippets and fashion them into a wintry poem.
Battle of the Bulge
by: Martin Achatz
My dad fought winter the way
Patton fought the Battle of the Bulge,
as if the fate of Western civilization
depended on it. He took no
prisoners as he rolled through drifts
and banks, ambushed pines where
snipers of white hid in branches.
For four, sometimes five months
Dad never surrendered to blizzard
assaults or cold as deep as
the Russian front. He should have
received the Medal of Honor
for being an arctic Sergeant York,
storming squalls with nothing
but a shovel in his hands.
They say Patton's last words
in the hospital were It's too dark,
I mean it's too late. Dad didn't
speak as he lay dying. Instead,
his arms and legs kept moving,
pushing, marching, as if he had
one last snowy battle to win before
he found peace.
