Obscure, the Beloved

Each family has its own memories

its own celebrations

and secrets.

1.

A memory of on the road,

off the car-heavy truck-mucked interstates of the USA

driving ever reaching tar paths through fields and fields

and fields of wheat.

I wore headphones, reading Orwell

(it was that time of awareness in my development)

and I couldn’t help but wonder about the power of one word

over another, how I differentiated between background lyrics

and foreground story but then I remember singing

The Cure as well

so who’s to say what background was?

My father forever behind the wheel;

the horizon, so remote.

2.

We celebrate the night before the night before Christmas.

Often there is wine

but that is nothing new

and always a couch, salad bowls of popcorn,

Jimmy Stewart because we are American

(he reminds us of our fathers).

Every year on the night before

the night before Christmas

we commemorate togetherness,

recite certain lines from It’s a Wonderful Life

and I am enchanted again and again,

the simplicity of a complex life:

money, demons, family

and my father relating

smiling shrewdly

knowing this to be true.

3.

I can feel his longing in our DNA

but I am distanced by land

and have always been by time

so of course his secrets are his to hide.

Still, I wonder

when a man is alone and with himself

does he drift beyond the reasonable?

Dream of many and varied small adventures?

Are there rocks to hop, logs to jump

bears and snakes to overcome?

I’m sure, with him, there must be airplanes.

Is my mother even there?

So easy to imagine other ways

of being a man.

So easy to desire the substance of shadow.