Yesterday my extended family gathered in a spare white New England Congregational Church to remember and celebrate my father's life. The walls were so bare and white that I was propelled inward and backward to try and furnish my reflections with a jumble of memories. Optima dies prima fugit, Virgil writes—the best days are the first to flee. Often I have approached my childhood, and childhood itself, with this sort of knee-jerk nostalgia. But I am beginning to doubt the value of this. I turn again to the poems of Li-Young Lee this week, because he encourages an ongoing wrestling with the past in the present. His dead father continues to haunt his meditations, or rather, Lee continues to resurrect his father on the page, as if to say, I will not let you go until you bless me. How does it still happen, that we continue to be able to wring meaning from the old words, the old stories, the old memories? I marvel at this, how a fresh voice can remake, refurnish, my parched inner landscape, my imagination ruined by routine, my restless and unsatisfied grief.
You Must Sing
He sings in his father's arms, sings his father
to sleep, all the while seeing how on that face
grown suddenly strange, wasting to shadow,
time moves. Stern time. Sweet time. Because his father
asked, he sings; because they are wholly lost.
How else, in immaculate noon, will each find
each, who are so close now? So close and lost.
His voice stands at windows, runs everywhere.
Was death giant? O, how will he find his
father? They are so close. Was death a guest?
By which door did it come? All the day's doors
are closed. He must go out of those hours, that house,
the enfolding limbs, go burdened to learn:
you must sing to be found; when found, you must sing.[1]
Here I Am
I wait. I don't go. He will come, the one
who waited for me each day
at the edge of the schoolyard.
I wait. And I am bitten thin
by waiting. And I grow
dense with luggage and time.
He will come, though
he may never come, who wrote his name
by drawing a spear borne in a heart.
In this life, this is how
one must wait, past despair,
the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.
I know a boy who fell asleep
one second before his father returned, his name
a lozenge thinning on his father's tongue.
I've heard of prisoners who died
a minute before rescue.
Such waiting has nothing to do with hope;
it has less to do with patience;
it's simply the way a soul is bent.
Such waiting is impossible.
But I wait,
for it's the only
possibility left to me.
And though I stopped waiting years ago,
I continue to wait.
Even now
he comes, whom death has made giant.
And small as the rain
and as many.
Whose Sabbath shoes
I blackened each Saturday
and buffed to hard armor.
Who set me on a chair and two dictionaries
and made me read an old book
of ancient and terrifying stories
while sucking butterscotch drops
he unwrapped for me.
Sweet learning, he called it.
Even now,
no one comes,
though I sense his pure approach.
Maybe he is lost,
the lonely one
who is no longer lonely.
Maybe he waits for me.
Maybe he fears he is forgotten,
the way I am forgotten,
each of us the one
who, in that childhood game, shouts,
though no one hears, Here I am![2]
This All Saints Day will carry a new significance for me, a new presence in the absence.
Peace and blessings to you.
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