Here's my free verse poem about my dad. I find it sad that he too wrote poetry, but none about his wife or family. I figure sometime soon I'm going to write poetry about Mom and slip it into the book of poetry he wanted me to transcribe for him. Anyway, here's my poem about him:
GONE MAN
She saw you, she thought.
The bright, quicksilver girl
With moonlight in her eyes.
You were her prince, her knight
You rocked her in your arms
And she saw possibilities in your eyes.
You shared corners of you
No one else had ever seen.
But not all.
Some, you kept back
For those
Silent green spaces you shared with no one.
She was your pole star
The maker of your tribe,
The designer of your life,
But you began to belittle her efforts
To paint over the gold with brown.
You shared a gypsy existence.
Babies multiplied
Dollars did not.
But the you's of you were happy
Until you were not.
We came.
A quiz
A conundrum.
A trouble in diapers.
All too soon you were
Dragging us across the planet
By the tiny arms.
Run! Faster! You're too slow.
Stop whining.
I'll give you something to cry about.
Until we ground you into place with inertia.
We, our needs, became your anchors.
Chaining you down
To a day long and dreary
None of our antics seemed to
Waken your smile.
A dearth of joy.
Only the mistakes.
Punctuated with watermelon seeds
And a rare day on the slopes.
Once, when I danced on your shoes,
Embarrassed,
While other little princesses
Chattered away.
I was never enough.
Good enough.
Smart enough.
Charming enough.
You were always there,
The stony monolith,
Seemingly impervious to
Wind or water
The battleship
Plowing through the waves
On a course you set.
No plea went unchallenged,
No hope unexamined in
Fine detail beneath the microscope
Of fatherly castigation.
Hour on hour,
One foot and then the other,
You flailed from us all
Broken compasses, all lazy chairs,
Any witless falsehoods,
Any unworthy dreams or
Uncomfortable questions.
Determination built you.
Your children would not
Deviate from the pattern
You set out with
Knife-sharp edges.
Somewhere along the way
You lost all of that.
The ship sailed without you,
Left you ashore and wondering
How it came to be
That your kingdom had shrunk
To the size of one woman.
You raged at the too tight lack.
You wanted to punch out
The other side.
The search eluded you.
Day in and day gone,
You ached for a place to stretch
Wings and walls and ideas
But they only held you inside.
One by one we escaped through a hole in your curtain wall.
You couldn’t fill the breach,
Couldn't go out the same way.
Couldn't see the good inside.
Couldn't find the good outside.
Stuck.
You searched and searched,
But nothing came.
You hoped you would be strong enough
To keep the enemy
Without.
But he entered anyway.
Entered and stole,
And took and carved away your ‘self.’
Walls of you fell and rolled and drifted,
Down into rushing rivers of
Manic activity, frantic,
But no more fulfilling.
Still the enemy chipped away.
Chipped until you began to let go,
Fingers aching from clutching
At what you had and
What you were afraid you couldn't keep.
You watched her watching you,
Knowing she knew your lacks,
Knowing you had become
Less
To the quicksilver girl.
You hated those lacks.
You hated the sorrow in her eyes.
You hated knowing
She knew how you failed
Yourself and her.
Your edges grew hard and sharp.
Hers sharpened in tandem
To find
That you'd hidden
All the you's you'd once
Shared with her
Along with the ones you never had.
She wept.
You raged.
You looked for other treasure boxes
To hold the bits
You no longer shared.
But none came.
How strange to see you wither
As I slowly waltz in the flaccid circle
Of your once-strong arms and watch.
The wind suddenly carving into
Your bastions and buttresses
And you,
Lost behind your eyes somewhere
Unable to call for help
Unable to find the words
To define your rage, to open the
Bars of your mind.
And your quicksilver girl,
So road-weary,
Defeated
Trudges along,
Pulling your leading strings.
You yank at those tethers,
Trying to prove you don't
Need them.
But you do.
You see us out here,
Getting away with things
You never sanctioned
And powerless to stop them,
Your rage builds.
If only you could recall
Where you put the keys to your mind.
If only your mind remembered the dance
Your feet still keep beat to.
If only you could go home,
Back to the simple place
Where deer came to drink and
You ran through green silences.
But you can’t go.
Not anymore.
Too many people hold the strings.
Hole you hostage in this dank, hot Hades.
Distress.
You clutch at the gone-ness
But can't quite reach.
No one will help you.
No one sees the hollowed-out inside of you.
You see with blank eyes.
Glimpses.
Flickers.
A shuffling waltz.
A fond see-you-later.
That faint, lost little smile
Barely there.
Time for bed--for the
Recklessness of sleep
For the practice death
The facing of dreams lost and forgotten
Your eyes shutter.
Your unknowable heart shutters.
Your lips shutter.
Your mind shutters.
And you have become
A gone man.
Sand sifting away
Into the wind,
All that’s left
Of the monolith.
Someday,
You’ll be found.
But which you?
Your quicksilver girl wonders.
And I wonder.
Who will you be when the shackles fall away?
©2021 by H. Linn Murphy
Nonets are the poem for the day. If you want to know how to write one, go here. And now for my double Nonet poem:
So many buried nuggets extant
Bits of grit rubbing places raw
I tried once to remedy
The lack, but already
His mind had retrenched
Into haziness
Too dang late
I wept
Dad
Pearl
Someday
From the grit
A gorgeous stone
Will grow and fill up
Our lives with nacred gems
Of thought and feeling and rich
Treasures that should have grown in life
Without the grit to mar and annoy
©2021 by H. Linn Murphy
No comments:
Post a Comment