Two Poems by Kip Zegers: “The Ride in” and “Another Thing My Father Did.”
Poems of war, violence, tenderness.
“fear’s big eyes behind glass …”
the ride in
Down from the Bronx to clotted Dyckman,
then south reading Emerson on “The Poet”
to Park Avenue, under the grim tracks,
east on 132 into Harlem rebuilt or refaced,
white guy waving Wall Street Journal flags a cab.
The ride in. At 5th & 129th, I blink and July,
1967, is outside: traffic blocked and stalled
as Newark riots press Harlem with rumor.
See a young man, just left work, watching
wipers sweep hydrant spray, kids at play
taunting traffic, fear’s big eyes behind glass,
drivers trapped. The sky sags low and yellow,
the avenue a tunnel as bodies of buildings
lean in, their foreheads seem to touch.
On one corner men with chains and chunks
of lumber. The other side, 10 cops in a van.
It is chance not miracle things do not get worse.
And in his room around the corner dining
on franks ‘n beans, the young man thinks,
“Langston Hughes once lived a block away,”
which was fact, solid in the uncertain air.
Once, in war, a hole in earth burst open,
of the three men there, George Oppen,
gone teacher and poet, was blooded, but
between him and death were two men.
He lived and buried his dog-tags, H
for Hebrew, at the fox-hole he crawled up from
but never left: a place cannot explain itself.
-
Survival was chance, not miracle. Back in college
Father Bittenz, S.J., taught us miracles,
Our Lady of Fatima, Father had a book
he’d made a list of cases, “If even one is true
it’s ALL true.” Was that the silver bullet
of an old man’s hunger for surety, and relief?
These layers under the topsoil of time.
I’m back. I’m looking out. Riding in.
-
We cross 116th St. A student never forgotten
lived near here. With her grandmother,
was all she had in the world. Years after,
met on the street, she was hurried,
no time to see if now had become enough.
98th Street. Central Park shining as if all
the doormen of all the great buildings
had joined to polish it for use. Walking now,
east on 98th, reading, a little girl emerges
from a polished door held open, and reading,
passes beneath a canopy, and reading,
enters a black car. It’s her ride in.
-
I rode with Mr. Emerson, father of poets,
who said, You can. You have already arrived
in place. He might have meant the ride in,
the swirl widening within it, like an eddy
in time. Once I saw, from a bridge on Bronx River,
a circling in the current, a leaf drawn in,
a scrap of paper spun away, an eddy peopled
with pieces from places upstream.
-
Another Thing My Father Did
-1-
In the father’s story, war whispered
“you own nothing but these tin, neck-worn tags.”
From Okinawa, he placed his lost
address like a prayer in daily letters
home. His son found them there, after.
When the father came home from the war
and his son was almost 3, the father
would have held back, waiting, to see.
When the father came home from the war
his son was confused — who? — three
in the house? Once, when they wrestled,
the boy struck out, the father doubled over,
the son closed his eyes.
-2-
In the son’s story war is a silent man
reading, peering out at Victory at Sea
on the new TV, score by Richard Rogers,
destroyers plow the South Pacific, and
each week, Navy wins.
The father who’d come home from the war
took them to swim. At Touhy Avenue beach,
the lake lay flat, empty of swimmers, icy under
a burning sky. The father said, “Prairie winds
send our lake’s warm water all the way
to Michigan.” The boy, at four, would not try
a toe. Timid son. Long after, the son holds
a photo he’s found: the father, still gaunt, pale,
has his arm around his son;
they are keeping an eye on that lake.
— after Li Young Lee
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Kip Zegers’s book, The Pond in Room 318, was published by Dos Madres, and he has written about poetry and and about speaking truth to power for The English Journal.
