I have been thinking of my father. Since he died in 1995 at the age of 89 I have not written very much about him. It is hard to begin to describe even for myself the role he played, the dimensions of the love he always showed, the confidence he made secure in me through his support which never failed, the good sense and moral strength he contributed in our shared lives. I write a good deal yet my father is a subject I find difficult to approach. It is as if I still cannot bear to say outright what I lost when my father died.
But I read, and sometimes I read poems in which I recognise the loss I still feel.
There is, for instance, the work of Raymond Carver, an American writer who died in 1988 at the age of 49. He was writing with increasing power and beauty when cancer got hold of him and killed him. He wrote many of his best pieces when he knew he was dying. Perhaps the thought of time and everything ending forced the good writing out of him. That seems strange to me. I don’t understand how anyone can do anything properly unless they are feeling they will never die.
Raymond Carver is best known as a writer of short stories. His tone is quiet, his eye is clear, his heart compassionate and his writing plain. There is a story of his called ‘Cathedral’ which is one of the best short stories I have ever read. It just tells about a young man trying to describe a cathedral to an old, blind man. In the end the young man takes a pen and begins to draw a cathedral with the old man’s hand closed over his so that the old man can “see” the cathedral as the young man draws it. It doesn’t sound much but it made my eyes prickle.
Carver wrote poetry also, a spare and conversational poetry quite like his plain prose. Here is a poem of his called “The Cobweb”, a classical expression of the fleetingness of human life, the flash of realisation that there is really only a very short time left to live.
The Cobweb
A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that’s happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
A cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
And went inside. There was no wind. The sea was dead
calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realises,
I’ll be gone from here.
And there is another of Raymond Carver’s poems from the collection In A Marine Light which I have read more than once since my own father died. Here are some lines from ‘The Trestle’.
I went to bed last night thinking about my dad.
About that little river we used to fish – Butte Creek –
near Lake Almanor. Water lulled me to sleep……
Fir trees stood on both sides of the meadows. And I was there.
A kid sitting on a timber trestle, looking down,
Watching my dad drink from his cupped hands.
Then he said, “This water’s so good.
I wish I could give my mother some of this water.”
My dad still loved her, though she was dead
and he’d been away from her for a long time.
He had to wait some more years
until he could go where she was. But he loved
this country where he found himself. The West.
For thirty years it had him around the heart,
and then it let him go. He went to sleep one night
in a town in northern California
and didn’t wake up. What could be simpler?
I wish my own life, and death, could be so simple.
So that when I woke on a fine morning like this,
after being somewhere I wanted to be all night,
somewhere important, I could move most naturally
and without thinking about it, to my desk.
Say I did that, in the simple way I’ve described
from bed to desk back to childhood.
From there it’s not so far to the trestle.
And from the trestle I could look down
and see my dad when I needed to see him
My dad drinking that cold water. My sweet father,
The river, its meadows, and firs, and the trestle.
That. Where I once stood.
The power of poetry to sadden and to comfort. That poem, and others, will have to do for the time being.
