poem for Father's Day

John Gould rowing in Oxford, ca. 1995

COPPER SEAL

Father’s Day.  Here’s a quiet hallway.

Grandpa’s twilit apartment

on Delaware Street.

Cozy, gemutlichkeit, OK.

Grandma’s old Revolutionary print

over the dining table.

George Washington & nimble

Lafayette – their filial détente

confirmed in pizzicato minuet.

Grandpa’s brass cannon

shell shines dans le coin –

Et nous voilà, sieur Lafayette.

So the crimson seal in melting wax

like Hamlet’s father’s ring

purls out, expanding

into undiscovered final acts –

Pacific reconciliations, palm-

print circumferences...

the moss-green salience

of Liberty’s majestic calm.

The Son of Man looks to his father

as to an anchorage –

firm stay against dry rage,

banal amnesia, unruly weather;

history would lose its thread

& be estranged, without

a commonality of thought,

that human constancy – dead

                *

center of the curly sprout

who springs up (fed

by seedy Shakespeare’s Head)

to brazen River of the Holy Spirit

(Father of Waters).  Before all times

the soul looks out in joy

upon a wide Creation Day

like mossy meadowlands – rhymes

with Honest Abraham in his

absinthe mandorla – bright

JFK & MLK – light-foot

Truth come marching in (this

copper seal of Peaceable Kingdom).

Light of fathers everywhere,

the milky dawn-lair

of the race, breathing soul freedom –

like whisper of Lipsanothek

(cross-braced in elephant

ivory from distant

Brescia) – a life made perfect

sustenance.  So a little acorn

from William’s Catholic Oak

(in windy Providence) spoke

to me once, as father to son;

as a green man in emerald coat

smiles from a heart of sunny

gold, so dauntless – funny!

Lifting my heart to his coracle-boat.

6.18.17

John Gould, U.S. Navy, 1945