Father of Four Daughters
(This is a sketch for something I'm trying to put in song form. Or maybe something else. Please excuse the ring of me writing about something I don't know. I aim to take this and compress it into a few lines...)
Everything here clings to everything else. The country house bought only decades ago is spent. Droplets of water cling to the wooden enclosure fence. Paint peels in the afternoon magic light on the porch. He sits there, paunchy, professorial in the autumn of his life, rising periodically to feed the parakeets, to fiddle with the various stringed instruments, to adjust the refractive crystals, to rearrange the bookshelves to reflect the new map of his wandering mind. Only wandering now. No more dialectics with Gaia. One of them will die first, they said. It was her. And now bearded Ouranos wanders the halls because the stars have been hidden by stratus expanses for weeks.
Afternoon sun and the yellowish dust motes floating in the beams of the living room. Tastefully out-of-date furniture, infused with smells he can no longer recognize, because they are the scent of him, with hints of the others, the women who grew here, who gave what they needed, and dispersed to their fates, whether domestic or peripatetic, whether ecstatic or sclerotic.
One went on to nurture her brood, but half-way across the continent. When she comes, on her sweat comes the acrid tone of obligation, and when the light arises in those features, when her mouth opens to reveal the gaps in her teeth and the wrinkles that encroach on the corners of her eyes it is good, but soon forgotten, fleeing into the corners of the room. The light is in her children's energy, rising in the house and making it creak. They can see its nooks and crannies as the conscious offerings they are: friendly obstacle courses; grandpa's labyrinth. For when she was born and grew, her arising in this world, and the approach was torturous. Insecure. Unfinished and unsupported for months. Here, as everywhere, there were things that we will never know. But in no other daughter was that horizon of space around her actions more accusing.
Another daughter comes for weeks on end, but never for holidays. The tenets of her purity preclude that. This is the woman he imprinted with what he was before he met his wife. She. Gaia, who disabused him of the impulse to walk for a week in the foothills just to see that perfect tree on the mountainside rising defiantly. She who almost died as a cougar paced behind her, confused by the motionlessness while she observed a flower opening in the woods. This one, who radiates his heart, who shares with him that emphasis on detail: the crystal bauble, the imperfection of the fence, the little uniquenesses of the crows. She, who has such frantic and desperate tales to tell. She who has a hairpin crack straight in the delicate porcelain of her heart. She, who left the other day, of whom the stratus clouds and the clinging droplets whisper.
The third is repetition. The third, penultimate child. She who was raised less haphazardly. She whose impulses, when they arose from those earthy, shadowy depths, found their outlet not in the march of generations, not in the odyssey of family photos stacked in chests until they break the boards with their heaviness; no, her outlet was a single man. A quality man. A man with ambition. A man who gave her the children she wanted, but who always took the biggest cake slice. Who insists on organizing gatherings, who raises fatherly hackles. This husband is repetition. Repetition of the pathway that loomed long, long ago. A pathway almost taken, that sapped so much. A path of desperate bluster. And this old lion knows a few things the young, limber usurper does not. But this is not about the men.
There are trees on the property for all the daughters, and he walks sometimes in the grove, and looks for portents in the branches, marvels at the long view, the wide view, on which they branched just as they were predestined, but then takes the micro-view, the view of accident, the view of freedom, of groping in the unknown air. Some of the branches have twisted around each other. Some have entangled others. He has had to prune some major ones. The tree for his second daughter, in particular, is missing a root node. It looks lopsided. Moss grows on the first daughter's tree. The third daughter's tree is favoured by the squirrels and birds.
Ah! The fourth daughter. She. She who will tell our stories in song and poems. She who has been prodigal, for otherwise, how would she tell anything? How else could she have risen from the cottonball hugs of the rest of us, she that was so much younger? She who seems to have a face full of shrapnel? She who reminds him of the accusing peeling-paint buildings of the parts of cities where artists gather? She who breathes that? She who has gone too far, even by her father's tough-mindedly open standards? She on whose breath comes the breath of self-consciousness, self-criticism maybe finally taken too far. She who will either be unknown, or she who will tell of our ways to posterity, long after the house and the fence and the bones and the flesh has gone. She who may blow the pollen of our longing into the winds.
Consider: "There's a big pile of innocent bones still holding up the garden wall / and it was always the broken hand we learned to lean on after all."
Everything here clings to everything else. The country house bought only decades ago is spent. Droplets of water cling to the wooden enclosure fence. Paint peels in the afternoon magic light on the porch. He sits there, paunchy, professorial in the autumn of his life, rising periodically to feed the parakeets, to fiddle with the various stringed instruments, to adjust the refractive crystals, to rearrange the bookshelves to reflect the new map of his wandering mind. Only wandering now. No more dialectics with Gaia. One of them will die first, they said. It was her. And now bearded Ouranos wanders the halls because the stars have been hidden by stratus expanses for weeks.
Afternoon sun and the yellowish dust motes floating in the beams of the living room. Tastefully out-of-date furniture, infused with smells he can no longer recognize, because they are the scent of him, with hints of the others, the women who grew here, who gave what they needed, and dispersed to their fates, whether domestic or peripatetic, whether ecstatic or sclerotic.
One went on to nurture her brood, but half-way across the continent. When she comes, on her sweat comes the acrid tone of obligation, and when the light arises in those features, when her mouth opens to reveal the gaps in her teeth and the wrinkles that encroach on the corners of her eyes it is good, but soon forgotten, fleeing into the corners of the room. The light is in her children's energy, rising in the house and making it creak. They can see its nooks and crannies as the conscious offerings they are: friendly obstacle courses; grandpa's labyrinth. For when she was born and grew, her arising in this world, and the approach was torturous. Insecure. Unfinished and unsupported for months. Here, as everywhere, there were things that we will never know. But in no other daughter was that horizon of space around her actions more accusing.
Another daughter comes for weeks on end, but never for holidays. The tenets of her purity preclude that. This is the woman he imprinted with what he was before he met his wife. She. Gaia, who disabused him of the impulse to walk for a week in the foothills just to see that perfect tree on the mountainside rising defiantly. She who almost died as a cougar paced behind her, confused by the motionlessness while she observed a flower opening in the woods. This one, who radiates his heart, who shares with him that emphasis on detail: the crystal bauble, the imperfection of the fence, the little uniquenesses of the crows. She, who has such frantic and desperate tales to tell. She who has a hairpin crack straight in the delicate porcelain of her heart. She, who left the other day, of whom the stratus clouds and the clinging droplets whisper.
The third is repetition. The third, penultimate child. She who was raised less haphazardly. She whose impulses, when they arose from those earthy, shadowy depths, found their outlet not in the march of generations, not in the odyssey of family photos stacked in chests until they break the boards with their heaviness; no, her outlet was a single man. A quality man. A man with ambition. A man who gave her the children she wanted, but who always took the biggest cake slice. Who insists on organizing gatherings, who raises fatherly hackles. This husband is repetition. Repetition of the pathway that loomed long, long ago. A pathway almost taken, that sapped so much. A path of desperate bluster. And this old lion knows a few things the young, limber usurper does not. But this is not about the men.
There are trees on the property for all the daughters, and he walks sometimes in the grove, and looks for portents in the branches, marvels at the long view, the wide view, on which they branched just as they were predestined, but then takes the micro-view, the view of accident, the view of freedom, of groping in the unknown air. Some of the branches have twisted around each other. Some have entangled others. He has had to prune some major ones. The tree for his second daughter, in particular, is missing a root node. It looks lopsided. Moss grows on the first daughter's tree. The third daughter's tree is favoured by the squirrels and birds.
Ah! The fourth daughter. She. She who will tell our stories in song and poems. She who has been prodigal, for otherwise, how would she tell anything? How else could she have risen from the cottonball hugs of the rest of us, she that was so much younger? She who seems to have a face full of shrapnel? She who reminds him of the accusing peeling-paint buildings of the parts of cities where artists gather? She who breathes that? She who has gone too far, even by her father's tough-mindedly open standards? She on whose breath comes the breath of self-consciousness, self-criticism maybe finally taken too far. She who will either be unknown, or she who will tell of our ways to posterity, long after the house and the fence and the bones and the flesh has gone. She who may blow the pollen of our longing into the winds.
Consider: "There's a big pile of innocent bones still holding up the garden wall / and it was always the broken hand we learned to lean on after all."
posted by A. D. at 9:59 AM
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