My ambition to be done with ambition
suffered a setback at my father’s funeral
when I wanted to say something profound
that he would hear, that a tree could understand,
that the wind would feel, but the only words
I could come up with were a handful of dirt.
The sound of it hitting his coffin,
as if shouting at him, woke me up
and I took my clothes off and walked away,
back into my life as his child,
when all I wanted was to hold his hand.
I am now fathered but fatherless, a being
whose being can half be traced
to a hole in the ground,
where my father’s beard is,
and his bones. His beard will grow
for a while down there and his bones
will never cast a shadow, and I’ll always know
where to go to look at his name
cut in stone. Rain, with patience
and the greed of love
to hold, will slowly erase his name
and everything it touches, it always sounds
like a eulogy to me, the sky
trying to figure out what to say
about loss, and making a mess of it
like the rest of us.
*from poet Bob Hicok, found in an August issue of The New Yorker. More – a very little bit – about Hicok here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Hicok
I gave eulogies for both my parents; it was assumed I would do so – although I have three siblings who could very well have sought the task, they did not. The eulogy I gave for my mother was much easier to write; she was a talker, open about her life, loves, affections and prejudices. My dad was a man of fewer words – when he could get one in, edgewise; I did the best I could. A lifetime ago, or so it seems, now all these years later. As Joan Didion said, ‘I am no longer the person I used to be.’ For me, that is certainly due, in part, to the passing of those central characters in the drama-rama of my life. I simply am no longer the person I once was, for those losses, and so much more. And, ah-men to that.