Not Talking

verba volant, scripta manent

Can this be all that remains-two or three weeks a year,

sitting at the opposite end of the dinner table from my father?

To listen to his breathing, more snorting than breathing,

puffing out air through his nose during mouthfuls,

chewing loudly with open mouth, without enjoyment,

uninhibited, inhibiting, his only talk, talk of food?

And to watch myself watching him, fastidious and disloyal,

feeling my muscles through my shirt-an open knife!

(My own part of the conversation, thin, witty, inaudible,

as though I'd spoken in asides for twenty-five years.)

To come back to him unannounced, at regular intervals,

one of two or three un-self-sufficient, cryptic,

grown-up strangers he has fathered, and see again

his small silver mouth in his great grizzled face,

head and stomach grown to childlike proportions,

supported on his unchanging, teenager's legs . . .

To come upon by chance, while emptying the dust-bin,

the ripped, glittery foil-wrapping of his heart-medicines,

multiplication timetables of empty capsules,

dosages like police ammunition in a civil disturbance,

bought for cash over the counter and taken according to need-

like his sudden peremptory thirst for a quart of milk.

If sex is nostalgia for sex, and food nostalgia for food,

his can't be-what did a child of the War get to eat

that he would want to go on eating, and to share?

Standing in the road as the American trucks rolled by:

chewing-gum, cigarettes, canned herrings, a kick in the teeth.

(The way it is with dogs, and their first puppy nourishment:

potato-peelings, or my maternal grandmother in East Germany,

and Chéri, her gay dog-pampered, shy, neurotic Chéri,

corrupted by affection, his anal glands spoiling with virginity-

she feeds him heart and rice, the only cooking she ever

does.) ...

After the age of fifty, a sudden flowering, half a dozen novels

in as many years-dialogue by other means: his main characters

maniacs, compulsive, virtuoso talkers, talkers for dear life,

talkers in soliloquies, notebooks, tape-recordings, last wills... .

Hear him on the telephone, an overloud, forced bonhomie,

standing feet crossed, and one punishing the other for lying,

woken up once at midnight by a drunken critic

with his girl-friend hanging on the extension-

her swect name not a name at all, but a blandishment-

finishing with promises, and his vestigial phrase of English

after ten years in England, "Bye, bye." Then going off to pee,

like the boys at my boarding-school after fire-practice . . .

Till that time, I had a worshipful proximity with him,

companionable and idolatrous. If my nose wasn't hooked,

my hair not black and straight, my frame too long,

my fingers not squat and powerful, fitting the typewriter

keys,

then it was my mother's fault, her dilution, her adulteration.

Home from England, I landed on a checkered pattern

of unwillingness and miserable advice. Not to take drugs,

not to treat my face with vinegar or lemon-juice,

to make influential friends, and not to consort with others.

And, on interesting subjects, either a silence

or the interviewee's too-rapid turning to his own experience . . .

Perplexed, wounded, without confidence, I left him to himself,

first going round the block on a small-wheeled bicycle

in one of his leather jackets, like an elderly terror;

or, now, on walks with my mother in the shitty park

among the burghers: his duffle-coat in the zoo of democracy.

A performance, like everything else . . . What's the point?

He wants only his car and his typewriter and his Magic Marker.

Every action he divides into small stages, every traffic light

on the way home, and each one he punctuates with a crucified

"So."

I ask myself what sort of consummation is available?

Fight; talk literature and politics; get drunk together?

Bid him goodnight, as though half my life had never happened.