Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver

Thank you, Ray Whitaker, for including two of my poems about my father on Masticadores Canada!

Dad was always anxious and depressed. He missed the past, his idyllic childhood. He clung to his possessions and grieved his parents’ deaths. He was an only child raised in a house his father had built on Lake Michigan. He fed us his childhood legends each night around the dinner table. We often heard about how a doctor had to use forceps to deliver him. He was able to recite every Christmas gift his parents gave to him. Back in the day, the gifts were modest, a pair of knitted gloves, a red truck, and so on. Just one gift a year. He even bragged that he recalled being in his mother’s womb! I saw his memories as strong attachments. It seemed the older he got, and the more distant the memories, the more depressed he seemed. His grief would reach for me across the states. I felt helplessly attached to his pain.

His Mourning Heart

–In response to “Melancholie”, a Statue created by Albert György in a park, Quai du Mont Blanc, in Lake Geneva, Switzerland 

I see through my father

into his past, where he always lived,

where his joy burned 

into embers of anger and loss

as though leaving the cottage by the lake

was as tormenting as his birth struggle

when he tossed and turned

to his mother’s forced breathing,

the exit half-closed.

The forceps gripped his temples.

The extraction was his eviction from her

to the slap of cold light.

The late-life son clung to his crib,

suffering the fear of possibility.

Somehow, he survived

the stormy lake waves

and deep drifts of snow.

This is how he lived, 

in struggle and doubt,

sensitive to harm, 

to being pulled into caring

because caring was losing,

and losing was grieving.

SUBMISSION CALL POEMS: MEN

I am unable to locate the link to this poem Ray published.

Estate Sale 

“When someone is missing, their possessions take on meanings.” 
– Claudia Emerson (1957-2014)

How the day lays the gray fog into rain
That presses on fallen leaves with bent stems.
Am I ready to sweep them into bags -
Gently used jackets, old woven mittens?
Tell me who needs this apparel of trees.

One leaf still clings, my father, not yet braced
To give up his old toys, schoolbooks, first gun.
He wrote a memoir that ended with me.
Perhaps he thought I would know my story,
Or he didn’t want to get it all wrong.

A sole leaf still being written on bark,
He cleaves to the long branch of his mother.
An ancient oak, pruned to keep her health up,
She cannot stretch her limbs out to the clouds.
Instead, her girth grows thick, her stature short,
A broad support for plumage & branches,
To which father maintains a firm handhold.

I gather their porcelain, albums, & garlands.
I wash her face & dress her in twinkling lights. 
Father lets go as I head to the sale.	

This poem first appeared in October Hill Magazine, Spring 2021