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
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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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