Dialogues (Against Literature)

Years later I will remember this terrible time as not only about myself

Or not only that to punish my father I made myself unhappy

From my window I could see that much else was wrong

Across the street new construction had struck open an underground pipe and for months after water would shudder down the boulevard

Not shudder, exactly

It was as if the road had been forced open and was now weeping violently

I had known such devastation in my youth but now

It was happening to the world around me

Summer stretched into November

The chemical clouds I mistook for glory

Benzene flowering overhead like a wild lily

Pinkly iridescent

I thought of my father’s loneliness and felt every cell in my body fall silent

And knew this was love

And knew I had come very far in my distance

To let tenderness rule me

Of all the men I despised he perplexed me most

Wretched as Aristophanes and as maddening

Or that professor who shot himself in bed

Leaving a mess for his widow

Whose bulbs I planted one fall when she was too sick to put her hands in the loam

He would lean over me until his beard stroked my skin

Just to say I had misread Cortázar

How one day in my waning thirties I could no longer read Hemingway ever again

“Ever again,” a phrase that pains like an early death

In the past my father could choose to forget me and the wounding words we exchanged

And now I forget why I left him behind

Something to do with poetry or risk

That other professor declaiming at a downtown café the need to uproot oneself in order to be brave on the page

As if he ever left his house, as if neither of us had overheard Flaubert flaunting his dull life

Or my father’s father who thought nothing could be better than being his student

Looking around the table accounting for his black-eyed hungry children

All terrible at philosophy

There was only one daughter who even into old age everyone described as foolish

Chiding her poor decision to fall in love with a dying man

Though in this she was no vanguard

She held him as he passed, wept the whole of her breath into him, and then the next year sat for days, alone, at her mother’s deathbed

And where were her brothers

One was in prison, another in Athens, and the youngest was across the alley eating noodles with a neighbor

Even now my father sleeps through the night and does not dream