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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476757" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Making Peace With My Father</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">You could be dead by now. <br>How would I know? <br>Last time I saw you <br>was fifty-five years ago. <br>My first day of school.<br>Your last with us. <br>You’re the little man now, Paddy, <br>you said <br>then got on a greyhound bus <br>in front of Tang’s Pagoda<br>as I watched the door close <br>on that fuselage without wings<br>as if the whale had just swallowed Jonah whole.<br>The last time I noticed we had the same eyes. <br>The end of your reign of terror. <br>As I remember you fifty-five years later <br>you were brutal, violent, cruel, <br>a con-man and a drunk. <br>You hurt people then laughed at their pain. <br>You were the lethal meltdown of a radioactive brain<br>that made the grass glow at night <br>from thousands of miles away <br>and poisoned the rain. <br>I went to jail with my mother to bail you out <br>more often than I was pushed into going to church.<br>And when you got out <br>you were always as angry as a killer bee<br>in the soggy autumn orchard of your hangover.<br>Life for you as it is for any coward <br>was one long complaint you took out on us.<br>My first seven years <br>I watched as many ambulances <br>take my shattered mother away for months <br>as many cop cars washing up on our doorstep <br>with all those messages in a bottle <br>that had your name on them <br>like a federal warrant for your arrest <br>as I recall the clinking horse-drawn milkwagons<br>with their coloured cardboard bottle caps<br>or the tinkling neighbourhood ice-cream trucks.<br>Remembering you now at this late date <br>is like fingering the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus Rex<br>and feeling the faint resonance <br>of your ferocity even yet <br>through my fingertips <br>like a warm-blooded mammal <br>in the menacing shadow of a reptilian law<br>whose last judgment was always a jugular in a jaw. <br>If you’re dead, <br>if you’re truly dead, <br>did you die alone? <br>Did anyone grieve? <br>Did you change over the years <br>and become a good man <br>as righteous as the stroke of midnight<br>and atone for anything <br>before you boarded the next bus for the abyss? <br>Was your last flashback of life <br>the sunami you drowned in <br>after your psychological fault lines <br>flintknapped an earthquake<br>that brought the whole planet down on us<br>everytime you barged through the door <br>back from the bar<br>and turned a home into an avalanche? <br>Did you remember your children? <br>Did you remember me? <br>Did you ever wonder <br>how I turned out without you? <br>Who knows? <br>Maybe I’m way too late for your funeral<br>and this wreath of blood and thorns I bring <br>to lay on your grave<br>like the bitter irony you fathered in me<br>is not a fitting obsequy for either of us<br>because maybe, possibly, improbably <br>as you aged like an acid <br>time defanged your thunder <br>like a white cottonmouth <br>and the moon took back its crescents<br>and the lightning began to make crutches of the trees <br>it used to split like cedar shakes <br>with double-bladed bolts of light<br>that scorched so much more <br>than they ever illuminated in the darkness they returned to. <br>As if the whole of the little earth I knew then, <br>my mother, me, my brother, my sisters<br>sported the wounds you gashed<br>on everyone’s heart and a skull <br>like chopping blocks <br>under your bloodied blunted war-ax.<br>For longer than autumn’s been keeping time now <br>with rosaries of geese in passage <br>like the secret names <br>of God on the run <br>for bouncing rubber cheques, <br>I have carried you around inside of me <br>like a chromosome in a coffin. <br>It’s a kind of genetic locket<br>I sometimes open <br>to remember you by<br>when I’m mythologizing my scars <br>like blackholes among the stars <br>or the empty eyesockets <br>on the wailing walls of the dice <br>you loaded like the prophetic skulls of a bad choice. <br>And I still don’t know if I’ve come <br>like an eviction notice <br>to this dismal place <br>to condemn you <br>or exorcise your ghost <br>I have despised you for so long within me<br>like the sloughed skin of a snakey oilslick, <br>the black blood of a haemorrhaging eclipse <br>that covers everything like an executioner’s hood, <br>the birds, the sun, the sea, <br>every tarnished cell of me<br>in a darkness that won’t wash off. <br>Or maybe I’ve just shown up again <br>like Empedocles on Aetna <br>to jump into the collapsed caldera of your grave <br>like the last flower.<br>Ambiguous homage with seven kinds of meaning<br>to a spent volcano<br>buried in itself <br>that once knew how to preserve the dead<br>in all the twisted shapes of prolonged agony <br>that has characterized the living ever since. <br>Every day of my life <br>I have wanted to give you back your name <br>like a white cross on a black plague door <br>that isn’t me anymore <br>and never was.<br>Or maybe I should <br>jump down into your grave and say <br>Hey, Dad, isn’t this sad for you and me <br>this is the way we take leave of each other for good <br>like chainsaws snarling through the heartwood of the family tree? <br>Isn’t it just so incomparably sad <br>that a son being honest as a deathbed<br>with his father as he dies <br>over and over again in his imagination<br>as I do now here beside you <br>should lean over and whisper into his father’s ear<br>with a heavy heart that regrets it was ever born to mean it<br>Hey, Dad, I want you to know <br>when it’s my time to go <br>and I get to the other side <br>of all that was <br>and can be abandoned<br>time will heal everything <br>you did and didn’t do <br>and all these severed bloodlines<br>reach their final watershed, <br>all the weak threads <br>of what was unbound<br>like rain in the river <br>fall into the flowing <br>and be made whole as strong rope again, <br>and the eye that offended be plucked out<br>and an old fist be opened up like the new palm<br>of a better afterlife than the one we had here, <br>and reunited families everywhere <br>break bread together in love and laughter <br>and every father be a strong rafter <br>and every mother be a lamp in a tent <br>and a cool night wind <br>as intimate and near <br>as stars in a desert, <br>and every son <br>say farewell to his father <br>as I do now here beside you <br>on this re-useable illusion of a death bed<br>where I am trying so hard to listen <br>to the voices in my heart <br>instead of the wise-guys in my head: <br>Father, farewell. <br>You gave me these empty eyes. <br>My mother filled them with compassion.<br>May peace marrow your troubled bones at last<br>and God soften the stone <br>upon which you lay your head.<br>What has passed has passed <br>like a storm out over open water.<br>You were my father at noon. <br>I was your son at midnight. <br>You withdrew like a shadow<br>that dreaded the light.<br>May God grant you a deeper insight<br>into these lives <br>we pass along to one another <br>like candles in the doorway of a dark night<br>and the courage to see<br>when they’re blown out<br>and death comes to sever even this little thread <br>of earthbound lucidity <br>that exists like blood between you and me<br>why even if these eyes of yours you gave me<br>were washed up like the survivors of a shipwreck <br>on the eyelids of the same shores<br>we started out from together, <br>asked whose son I might be <br>and who among all the generations <br>of the unborn and unperishing gathered there<br>was the road that fathered my journey, <br>I would answer <br>my life was a river with only one bank<br>that flowed from a sea of shadows on the moon.<br>I would embrace my mother in tears <br>if I saw her standing there<br>for all the long, hard, humiliating years<br>she always sat on the edge of the bed<br>the last thing at night <br>before we fell asleep under her eyes <br>and quietly lowered herself down <br>like a ladder into a snakepit<br>so we could climb out<br>without getting bit by the same viper <br>that had struck her like black lightning <br>in the heel in an orchard in spring. <br>About you I wouldn’t say anything.<br>I’d swallow my voice like a sword.<br>I wouldn’t sacrifice a word <br>on the altar of the silence<br>that waited like a god <br>to hear himself named. <br>I’d shake my head. <br>I wouldn’t look for you among the dead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476757" data-title="Making Peace With My Father de Patrick White" data-description="You could be dead by now. 
How would I know? 
Last time I saw you 
was fifty-five years ago. 
My first day of school.
Your last with us. 
You’re the little man now, Paddy, 
you said 
then got on a greyhound bus 
in front of Tang’s Pagoda
as I ..."></div>
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