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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