Apropos of nothing it seems, I burst into tears on reading
“Roy Rogers Est Mort,” or maybe it's
because I'm living in Paris and homesick or more likely
that Roy looks just like my dad who's had
cancer three times and lives in Hawai'i, and I'm ten thousand
miles away and the last time he called, my
dad, not Roy, he sounded tired and confused and not
at all like the tall,
elegant guy I remember from childhood who erased that image
as soon as he opened his mouth, speaking
fractured French and making goofy jokes, and I think it must
be the Cherokee blood
giving them both that heap big handsome cowboy look,
but what made him laugh after going through
hard knocks right and left, the Depression, dead father,
careless mother?
Is that why they both turned to religion, stopped calling
on Jack Daniels, switching to
Jesus? Who wouldn't after seeing a world gone mad,
the camps, a crazy
kamikaze pilot hitting a ship in my dad's convoy,
and him watching it sink into the South Pacific
looking on as almost everyone aboard died, most of them still boys
yanked from factories and farms,
men burning to death or drowning because other men
wanted to rule the world,
not that any of them succeeded, and after the war my dad
was stationed
on an island in the Philippines, and because he didn't play
cards began to read
poetry, memorizing great hunks of it, which he recited
as my bedtime stories,
quoting “The Shooting of Dan MacGrew,” and still doing it
over the telephone, asking how my students like
Robert Service, and I not having the heart to tell him
I don't teach
Service but a bunch of feel-bad moderns like Eliot and Pound,
great lover of Mussolini,
two wretched anti-Semites, who suddenly I see through my dad's
eyes, which are growing dim,
unfocused except on the past, where he's still a young man,
his life an adventure, ups and downs,
victories and defeats, moving from Oklahoma to California,
singing in bands. Go
west, young man, go west to Alaska, Hollywood, Hawai'i,
marry decent Christian women, pretty women,
excellent women, buy suburban bungalows, father children,
entertain them with your stories, your poems,
your shows, but for God's sake don't die and let them see your
photograph in the newspaper, le journal, die
Zeitung, so the whole world can remember your smile and how great
you looked on a horse.