Who knows how to love unless once loved
Forty years and forever
to figure him out
almost forty years after
Forever dead at forty nine, fixed ‘as is’
as in my time, few left that knew the mean dogs
the Raleigh cigarettes, he and I acquainted a mere
twenty-odd years because who knows anything when
You start off knowing nothing of the world
who knows anything from the early years
wait—I knew. From scratch. Such loneliness.
Aging strands of him rise up, flat, thin things, like
I remember he didn’t care about baseball
rising from nothing, when my thoughts wander
while driving as he did, too fast, when hearing
others say my father, my father’s father, thinking
Who are those people born of strong, sinewy roots
not brittle scurvied roots forced out by too dry
earth, pot bound strands of a cankered tree, whirled
stormied, not gently airborne like cottonwood puffs, not
White, plush, historied happy families
and now I’m older than he got to be and still puzzling him
considering his own unhappiest of families—but I have his laugh
slitted eyes, weeping mirth, wheezing smoker’s hack, all
Thanks be to the brothers Marx and Fleischer
for rotoscoping his laugh against it all, laying it into my head
thanks to Popeye and Harpo. But what if the laugh is nothing
it doesn’t replace the good seed, what good family does, unless
It’s the chaff that matters most, separation being imbecilic
like playing my father’s thick, heavy 78 records when
he is away, cross-legged on the faded wool floral rug
in the shaded dining room, Muddy Waters, Shostakovich, and
Conjuring the sound of a different, time-winnowed father
