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O my pa-pa
Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff, whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never, or those that end, and he was silent as a carp, or those with middles which, if you think of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights in the woods, they've read every word and noticed that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like "My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine." They're not trying to make the poems better so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook or electrocution, as a group they overcome their individual senilities, their complete distaste for language, how cloying it is, how like tears it can be, and remember every mention of their long hours at the office or how tired they were when they came home, when they were dragged through the door by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked, not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence was his presence, his present, the Cheerios, the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees, that they're the most intricate version of standing up, who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy. A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me, and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted the rocket cars, as if running away from them to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did start to say something, to form the words hey or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun, into the burning leave, and were gone before it came to them that it was all right to shout, that they should have knocked us down with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified by the distance men need in their love.
Bob Hicok
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:hi:
RL
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