Monday, January 8, 2018

To My Father on His 100th Birthday

The bent wood of the empty highchair
Darkens each year, even though the caning
Holds up against the long-departed weight
Of your tiny body crying out for its first
Solid foods, even as the influenza raged
Around you and the bodies piled up.

My sister posts a photograph I’ve never seen,
You in your grandfather Lucius’s arms, 
Grandmother Frances stiffly looking on 
In her dark full length dress, the wood
Paneling dark and your father’s darkness
Not yet revealed in his downward loving gaze.

Your eyes alone look outward their innocence
Unfocused on any of the hammers fated later
To fall, your father’s becoming a stockbroker
In 1928, your wife’s madness, your daughter’s
Crib death, the corporate world’s finding
That you were another expendable engineer.

The wondrous light in your eyes appears now
To forgive it all in advance, under your father’s
Eyes saying silently I have made something good
Even though twelve years later he would put
His head in the oven, and thereafter would smoke
Himself to death while you sailed sea and sky.

The walls you built left a shadow so far behind
The scrim of unwanted memory that it is only
Now that I can see him, standing there at thirty
In bright tie and rounded collar tips his gaze
And his father’s gaze on you and your eyes
Only now, in a century’s blink, are my eyes.


© Bill Prindle, 2018

van Campen family portrait in a landscape
by Frans Hals, with the baby lower left
added by Salomon de Bray
Toledo Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons

2 comments:

jean said...

The history of several generations beautifully told in a few but very powerful words! This is a real and wonderfully crafted poem! Congratulations!

Unknown said...


Wonderful, descriptive poem with equally wonderful accompanying photo!