Poem Begun on the Day of My Father's funeral and Completed on the first Day of the New Year
Light the last light and lift—
and lift again in to that obscurity—
blue-skinned sky & what it cannot lead to—
the always immolated flesh of this world’s bone-shell—
what lasts? what goes like a trumpet blast
through the feathered
ear of the angel? There
& being & the evening air—
is in everything plummet—
& yet we go even some-
times rise—have you wondered?
that dark wick—flame both
inward & below light the first fire—
what does not burn
might still die—& yet
what does not might grow—may graft—
like leaf & branch together—
live this long lull
before the last:
let this
let my words
leave their black axe next to the tree
& may
the grace
of grace
feel through its fall
the way—
Copyright © 2019 by Dean Rader. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My father died a few days before Christmas in 2017. In fact, the day we received the news, the day I returned to Oklahoma to help plan for his burial, was also the day my sons opened holiday gifts. So, his passing was an emotionally intense convergence of death and birth, celebration and mourning. On the day of his funeral, I kept thinking of Wallace Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” maybe the most comforting text I know. That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I began this poem. I think I was attempting a corresponding convergence, something that would unite the solace of Stevens with the sense of holiness I associate with the language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And yet, I wanted a form neither comforting nor holy—something jagged, fragmented—something that might embody the brokenness I was feeling.”
—Dean Rader
Dean Rader
Dean Rader is the author of Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Suture (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench. He teaches at the University of San Francisco, and lives in San Francisco