This poem about my father is very personal to me. My father is himself a talented poet, but he gave all that up at some point after I was born. So in addition to the usual competitive father-son dynamic there was this “ghost of writing” between us. My own writing really began as a driven effort to seek his approval, which always meant a lot to me, even though I told myself that wasn't my reason for writing at all. At a certain point in my life, I and my writing grew into something with our own reason for existence. This poem, “The Competition,” addresses both sides of this sea-change: the contentious feelings of youth, when I challenged my parents, and then the perspective that's been gained now that I have grown older and come to love my parents for who they are.
- Justin Vicari |
It was a high school prize from the National Council
for the Arts, scholarship money and flying to Miami
where I tasted raw oysters for the first time, and shook
the hands of Racquel Welch and John Ciardi.
My parents decided to make it their vacation,
they booked the same flight, the same hotel.
Every morning my dream of unfurling my wings
died in the lobby, the restaurant. “So you're a poet?”
I imagined I'd be asked. “Were you terribly hurt?”
And I'd be ready with my serious answer. . .
Then her high-pitched laughter, his knife
clinking a glass for a toast. They were living through me,
it made me not want to live at all.
I was eighteen and had already gone further
with words than my father, those onionskins
he buried in the bottom dresser drawer, more fragments
of his voluminous secrets. I discovered gin there,
slept one night on the beach with the other
winners, young writers and actors and painters, all of us
burning to get out of our little worlds. I didn't tell anyone
I'd brought my little world with me, it had followed me
into the future. One morning they waved to me
across the lobby, and I turned away, as if from some
strange man and woman, I shrugged to my new friends
and said: I don't know those people.
Was it even a lie? Like bad Adams
losing our powers, he'd passed to me
this brokenness, this inability to name.
How mysterious he'd always seemed,
a fortressed country whose borders were walls.
His body has been taken apart and pieced together
many times now. His secrets are still locked inside,
intact. Or perhaps they all flew away,
through the surgeon's incisions, like wild birds
singing faraway in other trees. No one
needs to hear them anymore, to decipher
the pitch of their calls. He's seventy, healed,
mellowed by the running-down
of the body, and its jumpstarts, its re-mapping by doctors.
This time the strange men's hands on him
brought medicine, and life, like the irrigation
of a desert. Now there's a river
winding down my father's leg, a valley of pink roses
up and down his chest, crossroads joining
on his shoulders and arms. Nothing seems strange
or unreadable, anymore. Let him live
through me, if there's no other way.
Let him sigh and shrug the last of the fight away.
Some day he'll tell me who he was for all those years
in answers that will bloom inside my cells.
We will become, together, a new Adam.
We will give to everything its name.