All The White Horses Have Gone Ahead

You will return one day
Because of all the things that you see
When your eyes close.
- Morrissey

You know how it is when you have a volume of poetry, how you can easily pick your favorite pieces in a heartbeat, or how your memory can dredge up the same verses that once sounded off the sleeping gong in your chest? And how, always, in that same volume sit the other poems, the other poems that do not speak to you, no matter how much you squint at the words and study the spaces between them? You suspect that the poet is saying something urgent and spectacular, but the work itself is a stranger who refuses to meet your gaze.

In Stephen Dunn's Loosestrife, there was one such poem that I bypassed a lot. Reading it felt like knocking on a door that preferred to remain bolted, and I went through the last lines as unmoved as when I started off. This evening, I re-read Imagining Myself My Father for the first time in almost a year, expecting nothing but the same impenetrability, and was instead knocked violently off my feet. If I'd been wearing socks at the time, the poem would also have yanked them off, hard.

I actually can't understand how I might have missed it. If there was anyone who should've appreciated the poem in an instant, that would've been me, Daddy's girl, a sucker for the old man and his bald head and his easter egg figure. In Dunn's Imagining Myself My Father, the dad is a salesman in the exact same fashion as mine was, a man whose work inevitably flung him to distant cities. In such an occupation, solitude is as much a given as the car rumbling beneath your feet or the highways spooling out to what feels like a dreaded eternity.

(I remember how, when I was in High School, Dad had approached me on the eve of one of his business trips. He wanted to know how to operate a Walkman, and if he could borrow mine so he could listen to his Sinatra tapes on the road.)

With Dad after my Graduation last March.

In any case, here's the poem. Some things are just too good to keep to yourself. And I think I'll call up Dad in the morning and ask him how he is.


Imagining Myself My Father
Stephen Dunn

I drove slowly, the windows open,
letting the emptiness within meet
the brotherly emptiness without.
Deer grazed by the Parkway's edge,
solemnly enjoying their ridiculous,
gentle lives. There were early signs
of serious fog.

Salesman with a product
I had to pump myself up to sell,
merchant of my own hope,
friend to every tollbooth man,
I named the trees I passed.
I knew the dwarf pines,
and why in such soil
they could grow only so tall.

A groundhog wobbled from the woods.
It, too, seemed ridiculous,
and I conjured for it a wild heart,
at least a wild heart.
My dashboard was agleam with numbers
and time.

It was the kind of morning
the dark never left.
The truly wild were curled up, asleep,
or in some high nest looking down.
There was no way they'd let us love them
just right.

I said "fine" to those who asked.
I told them about my sons, athletes both.
All day I moved among men
who claimed they needed nothing,
nothing, at least, that I had.
Maybe another time, they said,
or, Sorry, things are slow.

On the drive back
I drove fast, and met the regulars
at the Inn for a drink.
It seemed to me a man needed a heart
for the road, and a heart for home,
and one more for his friends.

And so many different, agile tongues.