What My Father Believed

Man of his age, he believed in the things

built by men, the miracles of rockets and bombs,

of dams and foundries, the mind-killing

efficiency of assembly lines. And now the boredom

and blankness with which my students respond

to this tale of my father's loss of faith sadden me,

as times before I have saddened myself. Around

the middle of his life, I baited him wildly,

hung in my room the poster of Malcolm X,

whose lips were stilled around a word

that could have been freedom or fight or fuck.

I remember the first time I heard

my father say it. We had argued and I thought

I''d won. It was the same awful subject,

the war. I see now it was never how he had fought,

but his countrymen. He said we should not expect

to love war, but to know sometimes there was no way

around it, and I laughed and said "Just stop."

In his eyes I saw what he couldn't say,

though right as I was, I could not

predict what he muttered. The rage that made

him flush and stutter and sweat was gone,

and only a fool of twenty couldn't see the blade

of pain he suffered, and suffered all along.

What should I say to him today, when the truth

I was so eager to embrace is constantly told,

when the plainness of it rankles like a bad tooth

in our mouths and my students scold

us both as naive and thoughtless. What of Custer?

they ask. What of racism? slavery? the inexorable theft

of every acre of native land? And I can muster

no answer they'll accept, but am left

at the end of class the argument's dull loser,

silent, contemplating the nature of instruction.

My father believed in the nation, I in my father,

aman of whom my students have not the slightest notion.

CAMPING

I see my father camping, twenty-seven years

ago grappling inside the canvas gullet of a tent

he made with Harvey Winkleman, in their spare time,

working lunches and breaks, sewing a shell

around a skeleton of coded tubing,

between parachutes and the fancified guts

of the personal planes of generals,

every day through winter and spring assembling

a camouflaged and round-shouldered pyramid

in which they would sleep with their families,

their children and wives, for two

fleeting weeks of summer vacation in Yellowstone

or the Ozarks, or alongside some newly-made lake,

behind a dam, a smooth and miraculous monolith

made also by men, men like them

who could imagine one flood controlling all others,

who could see themselves as well in the summers

upcoming, camping: the laughter of children

hiding in the woods or swimming in the shallows,

wives lying on the docks in the sun

or stirring some stew, squatting in the blue smoke

from the campfire.