Full disclosure: I heard you read from this book in October 1989, as your signature and date indicate inside the book I bought when you visited Austin Peay State University during my junior year. In the previous four semesters, I had attended my first poetry readings, each in its own way providing me with a larger understanding of the role of poetry within the life of an individual. That night you were serious and playful, what someone later would call sacred and profane, and having grown up in a Baptist church, I embraced the sacred but tried, of course, to avoid the profane.
I remember, after the reading, saying something to you about how several of the poems you read traced time backwards. In one poem you named geological ages vertically down the edge of a cliff. In another poem, about your father, you flew across country to be at his bedside but then went backwards into his body back to before you were even born. The pattern happened enough times that it caught my attention, but also something about that desire to go backwards in time resonated with me and still does.
In “Late Poem to My Father,” you go backwards, trying to imagine the life of your father not as the grown man he was when you were a child but, instead, as the child he once was in “unlit rooms,” “mov[ing] through the heavy air / in [his] physical beauty, a boy of seven” while his own father sat silent in front a hot fireplace. The scene is ominous, fraught, full of tension. Though not clearly stated in the poem, this boy appears to have suffered trauma which, later, as a man, he copes with by drinking an “oily medicine” and eventually dropping down unconscious.
At the end of the poem, you say, “When I love you now, / I like to think I am giving my love / directly to the boy in the fiery room / as if it could reach him in time.” That “fiery room” is like a kiln in which “the mold by which [he is] made” hardens, except that, with love reaching him, perhaps he might be saved, rescued, preserved, formed in such a way that the "tiny bones inside his soul" don't become, as the poem says, "twisted in greenstick fractures." Such an interesting thought: his own child's parental love might extend back through time, creating a different mold than the one that ultimately shaped him.
Yours was the first poem that gave me the thought of imagining a parent as the child the parent once was, the circumstances surrounding a parent’s formation. “Late Poem to My Father,” I dare say, has given some readers a way to forgive their own parents, to look upon them with tenderness, imagining earlier childhoods that shaped their own.
I wonder if poetry can be a way to “go back” within time’s continuum to find a purer, more innocent, more loving reality, where the soul is not fractured, where we all might begin again—untainted, undaunted, reinvented, re-formed.
Who, now, can any of us be, since it’s possible, despite the children we once were, to look through parental eyes at our own parent, thus to help heal the child inside that parent, the innocence that might still have time to mature into a whole new definition of time?
Ever your fan...