Haunted

I’ve been captured by the villanelle lately. It’s a very precise poetic structure with both a rhyme scheme and a pattern in which two lines - introduced with the first and the third lines - are repeated at specified intervals. It does not come easily to me; I find it difficult to pull off a natural, lyrical villanelle. And yet I find myself writing them. I have heard it said - or read it written? - that the villanelle, circling back as it does to those two key lines, is a good form in which to explore obsessions, recurring events, memories one cannot, does not want to, escape. It’s a good form to use when a few images have you by the throat and won’t let go.

The villanelles I’ve been writing are about my father. I remember my father best as a fisherman. As the years pass and specific details fade - what shampoo did he use? what did his voice sound like? what was he wearing the last time I saw him alive? what was he dressed in for his funeral? - there is still a  tightly held clutch of memories, solid like river rocks in my fist, that I can still see, taste, hear almost two decades after his death. Almost always, these memories, these moments, are connected to my father’s life as a fly-fisherman and to the places that life took him, took us. Invariably my memories of my father are bound up with the waters he fished, the waters that became the companions of my childhood and the rivers to which I always, though years may pass, return. The places I love and the ways I love them have everything to do with this simple fact: my father was a fisherman.

That is the line I cannot let go of. The line that will not let go of me. That is what I return to like a salmon to her spawning ground. That is my one true thing.

My father was a fisherman.

When I watch you

I’ve been writing from some old black and white photographs of my parents when they were young, pictures mostly taken by my grandfather the amateur photographer. In a family that didn’t tell stories about itself these photos are the few stray bread crumbs left in a trail that the birds almost picked clean. They lead somewhere, these pictures, these moments. They lead here, of course, to me, to my sons, to today as surely as the past always leads to the future; but they lead someplace else, too, down other paths to alternative futures my parents could have, but didn’t, live out. And they lead me backwards, as well, back to each of those moments to wonder which was the moment they chose this future instead of that one, or that one.

Did they in fact even choose, or did they just take the car out of gear and let the momentum carry them?

 Christmas 1953

The back of her hand
meets her brow
in a gesture so theatrical
it could almost be posed,
the distress signal of a dozen
damsels in distress.
Her arm is all slender grace,
the branch of a weeping willow.
Her eyes are closed;
she is tired of pretending cheer,
wants to leave.

He is turned to her
his hand grazing her exposed back:
a solicitous reflex -
I almost say “as always”
but on the back of the print
her careful hand has noted
Christmas, 1953.
Married a mere seven months
there is no as always
yet.

He is wearing a suit,
she glamorous in black strapless.
They are smoking
(as always)
but there are no cocktails
unless they’ve been cropped out
or that habit has not developed
yet.

She is just twenty
but looks already weary:
that arm frozen in time
hand to brow
those closed eyes,
the beginning of a sigh
as if she already knows
all the disappointing years
before she dies.

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You can catch other poetic glimpses here.