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