Tonight, Kristine and I will go to Kalamazoo to celebrate my father's 80th birthday. One of my sisters asked each of us to write something in tribute to our dad. She emphasized to me that it not be a dissertation length work. I wonder why.
I'm not a poet by any means, but these lines came to my head after our recent trip to Manistee several years ago. I hope they're concise enough.
Anchored in a current that has brushed our boats
for more than twenty years,
my father, eighty, and I, forty,
sit in silence and expectation, casting for salmon
in a cloud-smothered dawn.
Drizzle falling this September morning prickles us
under the force of a December wind,
yet we fish all but impervious to the bluster,
my father, in his parka, I, in overalls of stiff duck
underlain with pillowy quilting.
This strong but giving shell is my father's.
Before we launched, knowing I had shivered the day before
in thin layers of cotton and nylon
he dug the overalls from among the bundles in his car.
When I pulled them on, the wind faltered against me.
Bobbing in the darkness as this day begins,
I see into the darkness of some day’s ending
more than thirty years ago, my father,
standing above me, singing, after he pulled the blankets
over my child’s frame, I, drifting into sleep,
all but impervious to passing nighttime fears.
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