Our Fathers Give Birth to Themselves

 

I am eight and riding the bus with my dad, and he tells a man

across the aisle to stop doing whatever it is that he’s doing,

and the other man starts to swing at my father, who says something

in the man’s ear that makes him lower his hand and get off

at the next stop. “What did you say to him?” I ask,

but my father just shakes his head, obedient only to himself.

Springsteen tells of the time he dreamed he knelt by his father

in the audience and watched himself performing and pointed

to the man on stage and said, “That’s you, Dad,” and his father,

too, is silent. Alone and stern with ourselves, we plunge deeper

into the wilderness, where at last we find ourselves amidst

throngs of angels, and then we see our parents, blind to us

yet so happy that we don’t care. Our fathers pull our mothers
close, and they laugh and talk. It’s just them, in love again.

The Spirit Rapper

After the Civil War, increasing numbers of bereaved found solace in Spiritualism.
-Smithsonian Magazine, October 20, 2012

So many died, Caleb among them. Jonah said he heard him scream
and saw him running across a field strewn with arms and legs,
half his face blown away by shellfire, but his body was never found.
Sarah took to her bed for three weeks. When she got up again,
she said, I’m not ready to part with him yet. Someone
in the village said maybe she wouldn’t have to, that Caleb
was still here, was just on the other side of a veil that could be
lifted by the right person. So when that spirit rapper came down
from Hydesville and said he knew where our boy was, we listened.
The neighbors came, and the spirit rapper called for us to put out
the light and hold hands, and at first there was nothing,
then some raps, then more, louder and faster. What is it, said Sarah?
That’s him, said the spirit rapper. I felt a hand pull my hair.
Someone pinched me! said Sarah. There was another rap,
and a man from across the way said a spirit tapped him
on the shoulder. Later the spirit rapper drank himself to death,
but not before confessing he’d made it all up, that the raps
were just him cracking the joints in his toes. But the boys kept dying.
Even Justice Holmes said, The dead come back and live with us.
I see them now, more than I can number, as I once saw them
on earth. Finally Sarah slept, so I didn’t wake her
the night I thought I saw Caleb at the end of the bed,
thought I heard him say, I’ve seen the elephant at last,
and don’t care to see him any more. If there’s fun
in such work, I can’t find it. Then he said he’d give anything
for one of Sarah’s pies, the one she makes from the sour cherries
that she leaves on the tree almost until they rot, till the acid
and the sugar balance each other and the fruit tastes sweetest.

*

David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. His latest collection is More Than This.