There's an awful lot of anger in this poem, Ken, to put it mildly. I'm not
sure if, aesthetically, it is quite aborbed, although at the same time I
feel slightly inhuman in making such a comment.
Didn't have the same problems with my dad: the poor sod dropped dead in
front of my face in the middle of a conversation a week before my nineteenth
birthday and a few weeks before his longed-for retirement. A little while
after we got this letter from Burtons threatening to take him to court
because he'd stopped paying the hire purchase payments on this suit he'd
bought.
I do get recurrent dreams where I'm angry with my late mom though, but I
have no idea why.
Care
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 3:21 AM
Subject: Re: snap
> Mark Weiss wrote:
>
> > ANNIVERSARY
> >
> > Ten years since my father died, and fifteen if I make it
> > til I reach his age.
>
> Quite arresting. This, unashamedly, unrevised, obviously missed the
> Snaps deadline by a few years.
>
> BEATING UP MY FATHER
>
> In December, two months short of fifty-five,
> I will throw myself a private party,
> wrap my gut in a champion's belt
> and dance around my puzzled cat,
> belly boinging like a muted churchbell.
> Because I will have beaten you, Dad,
> won the contest incontestably.
>
> I've got a friend who says that Jesus Christ
> is her favorite literary character.
> Mostly these days my father is mine:
> Father the God, not quite reachable save in visions,
> an unholy spirit who descends in dreams
> I've written for the last eight years:
> a half-remembered, thwarted bastard
> whose photos still show me a man as grim
> and muscled as a 10-year-old feared.
>
> So no. You are not a literary figure,
> not anymore, the myth cheated of combat
> in World War I by the angering Armistice.
> No. You are the real man: muscles, warts,
> varicose veins stripped uselessly in the VA Hospital
> the year before you died purely in sin
> in the arms of a woman who was not my mother.
>
> You were two months shy of fifty-five. So now
> I'm on the countdown to finally kick your ass.
> You're not a metaphor, not a memory I never had
> but molded from dirt and dreams like like
> the Rabbi of Prague whipping up a golem he could not control.
> No, passing you for real, for keeps, simply
> by staying in the race long enough to outlive you,
> forgiving the man as I've forgiven the metaphor,
> letting you down from your cross,
> freeing you, perhaps, to assume your place
> as what I have absorbed, made mine
> which was--forever will be--yours.
>
> KTW/5-26-98
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
>
> 39. Not observing the imperfections of others, preserving silence and a
continual communion with God will eradicate great imperfections from the
> soul and make it the possessor of great virtues.
> --St. John of the Cross, Maxims on Love (The Minor Works)
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