Dialogues (Against Literature)
Years later I will remember this terrible time as not only about myself
Or not only that to punish my father I made myself unhappy
From my window I could see that much else was wrong
Across the street new construction had struck open an underground pipe and for months after water would shudder down the boulevard
Not shudder, exactly
It was as if the road had been forced open and was now weeping violently
I had known such devastation in my youth but now
It was happening to the world around me
Summer stretched into November
The chemical clouds I mistook for glory
Benzene flowering overhead like a wild lily
Pinkly iridescent
I thought of my father’s loneliness and felt every cell in my body fall silent
And knew this was love
And knew I had come very far in my distance
To let tenderness rule me
Of all the men I despised he perplexed me most
Wretched as Aristophanes and as maddening
Or that professor who shot himself in bed
Leaving a mess for his widow
Whose bulbs I planted one fall when she was too sick to put her hands in the loam
He would lean over me until his beard stroked my skin
Just to say I had misread Cortázar
How one day in my waning thirties I could no longer read Hemingway ever again
“Ever again,” a phrase that pains like an early death
In the past my father could choose to forget me and the wounding words we exchanged
And now I forget why I left him behind
Something to do with poetry or risk
That other professor declaiming at a downtown café the need to uproot oneself in order to be brave on the page
As if he ever left his house, as if neither of us had overheard Flaubert flaunting his dull life
Or my father’s father who thought nothing could be better than being his student
Looking around the table accounting for his black-eyed hungry children
All terrible at philosophy
There was only one daughter who even into old age everyone described as foolish
Chiding her poor decision to fall in love with a dying man
Though in this she was no vanguard
She held him as he passed, wept the whole of her breath into him, and then the next year sat for days, alone, at her mother’s deathbed
And where were her brothers
One was in prison, another in Athens, and the youngest was across the alley eating noodles with a neighbor
Even now my father sleeps through the night and does not dream
Or not only that to punish my father I made myself unhappy
From my window I could see that much else was wrong
Across the street new construction had struck open an underground pipe and for months after water would shudder down the boulevard
Not shudder, exactly
It was as if the road had been forced open and was now weeping violently
I had known such devastation in my youth but now
It was happening to the world around me
Summer stretched into November
The chemical clouds I mistook for glory
Benzene flowering overhead like a wild lily
Pinkly iridescent
I thought of my father’s loneliness and felt every cell in my body fall silent
And knew this was love
And knew I had come very far in my distance
To let tenderness rule me
Of all the men I despised he perplexed me most
Wretched as Aristophanes and as maddening
Or that professor who shot himself in bed
Leaving a mess for his widow
Whose bulbs I planted one fall when she was too sick to put her hands in the loam
He would lean over me until his beard stroked my skin
Just to say I had misread Cortázar
How one day in my waning thirties I could no longer read Hemingway ever again
“Ever again,” a phrase that pains like an early death
In the past my father could choose to forget me and the wounding words we exchanged
And now I forget why I left him behind
Something to do with poetry or risk
That other professor declaiming at a downtown café the need to uproot oneself in order to be brave on the page
As if he ever left his house, as if neither of us had overheard Flaubert flaunting his dull life
Or my father’s father who thought nothing could be better than being his student
Looking around the table accounting for his black-eyed hungry children
All terrible at philosophy
There was only one daughter who even into old age everyone described as foolish
Chiding her poor decision to fall in love with a dying man
Though in this she was no vanguard
She held him as he passed, wept the whole of her breath into him, and then the next year sat for days, alone, at her mother’s deathbed
And where were her brothers
One was in prison, another in Athens, and the youngest was across the alley eating noodles with a neighbor
Even now my father sleeps through the night and does not dream
