A Father's Day poem for you, Wonderful Father and Friend, a day late. I'm up at my cabin for a night doing a little work and getting away from the insanity. Things have gotten worse, if you can believe it, I will update my thread soon. For now just sending you a poem gift and another nod to your fatherly goodness.
- Gerda
Natural History
Sam Hamill 2018
Late afternoon, autumn equinox, and my daughter and I are at the table silently eating fried eggs and muffins, sharp cheese, and yesterday’s rice warmed over. We put our paper plates in the woodstove and go outside: sunlight fills the alders with the geometries of long blonde hair, and twin ravens ride the rollercoasters of warm September air out, toward Protection Island.
Together, we enter the roughed-in room beside our cabin and begin our toil together: she, cutting and stapling insulation; I, cutting and nailing the tight rows of cedar. We work in a silence broken only by occasional banter. I wipe the cobwebs from nooks and sills, working on my knees as though this prayer of labor could save me, as though the itch of fiberglass and sawdust were an answer to some old incessant question I never dare to remember.
And when the evening comes on at last, cooling our arms and faces, we stop and stand back to assess our work together. And I remember the face of my father climbing down from a long wooden ladder thirty years before. He was a tall strong sapling smelling of tar and leather, his pate bald and burned to umber by a sun that blistered the Utah desert. He strode the rows of coops with a red cocker spaniel and tousled boy-child at his heel. I turn to look at my daughter: her mop of blonde curls catches the last trembling light of the day, her lean body sways with weariness. I try, but cannot remember the wisdom of fourteen years, the pleasures of that discovery. Eron smiles.
At the stove, we wash up as the sun dies in a candle-flame. A light breeze tears the first leaves of autumn from boughs that slowly darken. A squirrel, enraged, castigates the dog for some inscrutable intrusion, and Eron climbs the ladder to her loft. Suddenly I am utterly alone, I am a child gazing up at a father, a father looking down at his daughter. A strange shudder comes over me like a chill. Is this what there is to remember – the long days roofing coops, the building of rooms on a cabin, the in significant meal? The shadows of moments mean everything and nothing, the dying landscapes of remembered human faces freeze into a moment. My room was in the basement, was knotty pine, back there, in diamondback country. The night swings over the cold Pacific. I pour a cup of coffee, heavy in my bones. Soon, this fine young woman will stare into the face of her own son or daughter, the years gone suddenly behind her. Will she remember only the ache, the immense satisfaction of that longing? May she be happy, filled with the essential, working in the twilight, on her knees, at autumn equinox, gathering the stories of silence together, preparing to meet the winter.
