I
Philip Roth’s father awoke on morning
shuffled into the bathroom to shave
and found that half his face had fallen
The other half stayed put
After that he died slowly and for a long time
My own didn’t go like that
He just turned off my brother told me on the phone
I was working in neonatal that day
scrubbed and ready to examine the two-pound baby
of a teenage junkie
I remember removing the surgical mask to talk into the receiver
My green scrubsuit looked absurd
the whole enterprise seemed suddenly futile and ludicrous
Later starving for the real news of death
I insisted on touring the morgue
He was on a slab all white
What did I expect
An asthma attack got him
That’s how I’ll go some ten degree morning
green plastic ventilator stuck between my lips
I shall die as my fathers die and sleep as they sleep
I will follow you’re example perhaps at last please you
II
I left my father’s house at seventeen.
I am all the daughters of my father’s house
Some kids’ fathers are chair-throwers beer-drinking bullies
But they’ll teach you to drive to skate to bat a ball
You were kind but distant
Marries at forty by then too settled and prosperous
for the rough ride of real fatherhood
My filthy mouth and drug-taking enraged you
You were 60 to my 19
The entire culture had just exploded
and nobody knew what to try and save
III
My father gave up Harvard Law to work in the family business
They raised us in Connecticut so we wouldn’t have New York accents
All the relatives in Hungary and Russia were exterminated
His mother was never the same after her first baby died
My father was a hawker as was his father
His father George nee Geza was the only grandparent I never met
Maybe that’s why the whole enterprise feels unreal
this mythological man the father of my father
stripped of his rightful history by an immigration clerk
The loupe screwed in his eye he searched for cracks and flaws
After dinner among melon rinds and
cookie crumbs he’d push back the tablecloth
fanning out the glossy blue packets half-carats baguettes chips
pear-shapes square-cuts blue-whites carbon-spotted clean
IV
On either side of my father
await two spoken-for spaces
plus four empties
Now he’d alone there but someday
He’ll lie between his wife and her mother
in the crossfire eternally bearing a recitative
of supermarket sales and long-distance rates
the same litany that drove him out of the room and
behind the classifieds during his life
V
Jackie Robinson lived down the street
I taught the Sulzberger child to swim
My father golfed with Benny Goodman
We had every advantage
VI
I think the last 10 years would surprise you
I’ve come down calmed down even staled down
Would you give my children more of yourself than you have me
Either answer is wrong