Love and wonder

A while back I tore out a little booklet from one of my magazines (either The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly); it’s sponsored by a financial company, and thinking it was just advertising I was going to throw it out, but I realized it’s a small collection of poems, entitled “Well-Versed: Poems for the Road Ahead.” I finally got around to reading through it, and one of the poems seems especially appropriate for Father’s Day, yesterday: “I Worry More” by David Filer, in which the narrator talks about both his son and his father.

A father’s no shield for his child —
— Seamus Heaney, “Elegy”

I worry more now that my son is out
On his own, earning a handsome salary
Back east. How big the country is, and how
Many ways to navigate it. He’s free
To cross his streets without a father’s help —
A father’s caution, practice reading the signs.
And though I must admit he’s doing well,
Anything could happen, and he’s still mine
To fret over. Finally I understand
My own father’s silence. Not uncaring,
As I once thought, it’s the brave wordlessness
Of love and wonder, and no little fear:
Two fathers, now watching from their distance,
Two sons who risk the futures they will miss.

It makes me think about my own grandparents, parents, and me, each successive generation having wandered farther — from the Philippines to California to D.C. — in search of new experiences, always with that mix of worry and love, wonder and fear.

The poem references Seamus Heaney’s “Elegy,” written on the occasion of Robert Powell’s death, and for reference I’ve included it in the extended entry.

The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
Robert Lowell,

the sill geranium is lit
by the lamp I write by,
a wind from the Irish Sea
is shaking it —

here where we all sat
ten days ago, with you,
the master elegist
and welder of English.

As you swayed the talk
and rode on the swaying tiller
of yourself, ribbing me
about my fear of water,

what was not within your empery?
You drank America
like the heart’s
iron vodka,

promulgating art’s
deliberate, peremptory
love and arrogance.
Your eyes saw what your hand did

as you Englished Russian,
as you bullied out
heart-hammering blank sonnets
of love for Harriet

and Lizzie, and the briny
water-breaking dolphin —
your dorsal nib
gifted at last

to inveigle and to plash,
helmsman, netsman, retiarius.
That hand. Warding and grooming
and amphibious.

Two a.m., seaboard weather.
Not the proud sail of your great verse…
No. You were our night ferry
thudding in a big sea,

the whole craft ringing
with an armourer’s music
the course set wilfully across
the ungovernable and dangerous.

And now a teem of rain
and the geranium tremens.
A father’s no shield
for his child —

you found the child in me
when you took farewells
under the full bay tree
by the gate in Glanmore,

opulent and restorative
as that lingering summertime,
the fish-dart of your eyes
risking, ‘I’ll pray for you.’