Holden doesn't have a great relationship with his father. His dad is a highly successful corporate lawyer who produces Broadway shows. Holden is his middle son who can't seem to get his crap together. Holden's sister, Phoebe, knows that Holden and their father have issues. When she finds out Holden has been kicked out of school again, her immediate response is simple: "Daddy's going to kill you."
As I informed you earlier this week, Sharon Olds just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Stag's Leap. I don't own a copy of Stag's Leap yet, but I do own a copy of her book The Father, a collection of poems about her relationship with, you guessed it, her father. The poems are full of beauty and pain, detailing a father/daughter bond that is fraught with complications. The father in the poems is dying of cancer, and the speaker is caring for him during his final days. As can be expected, the situation stirs up all the emotions, deep and raw, harbored throughout a lifetime.
One of the deepest poems of The Father is about words, the final shared exchange between daughter and father:
Last Words
Three days ago, my suitcases
were hunched there, in his hospital room,
in the corner, I had to pick them up
by the scruff of their necks, and leave him. I kept
putting them down, and going back
to kiss him again although he was exhausted,
shining like tarnished silver, and yet
I could not seem to pick up those bags
and walk out the door the last time. I kept
going back to the mouth he would lift, his
forehead glittering with effort, his eyes
slewing back, shying, until
finally he cried out Last kiss!
and I kissed him and left. This morning, his wife
called to tell me he has ceased to speak,
so those are his last words to me,
the ones he is leaving me with--and it is ending with a kiss--
a command for mercy, the offer of his cracked
creator lips. To plead that I leave,
my father asked me for a kiss! I would not
leave till he had done so, I will not let thee go except thou beg for it.
It's a holy moment, a sacred thing, the last words exchanged between child and father. The very last line of the poem is filled with ancient yearnings, the inability to surrender, to let go, of father love. Not all of the poems are this tender. The love expressed in Sharon Olds' poems is tough, hard as permafrost. It doesn't melt easily. It distills, warms over time into something alive and nurturing at the end of the book, where the father has the last word. The poem, titled "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead," concludes,
...
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean--where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter's love, for human
love go elsewhere.
It's a comforting moment, an extension of father love into something beyond matter and time, into eternity.
The Father fills Saint Marty with hope for love never dies. It transforms into something deeper, like snow into melt into earth into lilacs, like words into kiss into memory into poetry.
Confessions of Saint Marty
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