Such passion here, Ken. I am sorry you did not get to go the whole cycle.
Maybe not to this max, but I had such rage in my twenties.
"Absence is presence." Clearly.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
> Elegy Unpastoral, Unless You Consider a Jewish Cemetery
> In Queens to be "Pastoral"
>
> It's odd to engage elegy as a passion and, yet, so it comes to one with
> the
> passing of a father, any family member or close friend.--Stephen Vincent
>
> Timing is everything, or almost. My father died on July 5, 1954. And yes
> I made a monument of bereavement, but not from love, pure hatred instead,
> resentment of the bastard for wounding me, then dying like a rutting dog
> before I could get back at him. Everyone in my family is a Sicilian. It
> resonated, rumbled inside me like an empty stomach and hollow heart, when
> De Niro as Vito Corleone gutted old, blind Don Ciccio because the bastard
> had murdered Vito's parents and brothers 30 years before. Learn your
> lesson: never forget, forgive them when they are dead. "E morto...or egli
> perdono!" The trouble is my old man died on his own, probably with some
> intense vaginal assistance from a woman to whom he was not wed, so I would
> have to revive him, keep him alive in memory, kill him in my soul over and
> over, bring him back, kill him again. And find as I did so that I was
> killing a different man every time. Saying Hercules and the Hydra gives
> me more credit than I deserve. Saying "Touch of Evil" makes almost as
> much sense--firing blind into mirrors looking for the real father, only at
> last finding him here where he'd been for years, Montefiore Cemetery in
> St. Albans, Queens, City of New York, the inscription in Hebrew and
> English, desultory rocks stacked on top, my son interested more than I in
> going to the graves. Truthfully I don't feel like spending the nine bucks
> on the Verrazano Bridge to see a guy who really finally settled there
> awhile ago, a bag of bones and dust...except his memory haunts me, he is
> literature and thought, he is the man who made me what I became for many
> years, I still do not know whether to thank him for my life or curse his
> ass for tainting it with his traits of womanizing and the temper of Joseph
> Stalin. So I keep visiting. One day he will tell me.
>
> KTW/7-6-05
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