Be good to your only mother boy
and remember well your father
for he has fled and left behind
both you and life's palaver
(Frontispiece to the unwritten book
From a Suicide to a Son)
I believe my father didn’t die
in the same way others see
the face of Jesus in a sugar lump.
A line my own son may also write.
He did of course. I do not suffer
from Kübler-Ross* on the matter
(Stage one: Denial), but instead
see variations of him everywhere.
Not in the hallucinational
but the similar bodies and clothing
worn by men of his certain age
(now forever the same)
who wander along the streets
beneath my low balcony
or sit with their backs to me
in a nearby restaurant window
flaunting their male pattern baldness
and breathing for all to see.
For me. As Styron mentions
Camus mentioning in The Myth of Sysiphus
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to the fundamental question of philosophy.” (Darkness Visible, page 23 of the Vantage Edition –January 1992).
But I’m not going to do that now.
Or upon the next gloomy tomorrow.<
For I must leave early to fly
from my mother’s home to my own
and there be a father again
by leaving this man forever behind
although I will take him with me
always. His weight heavy yet invisible.
*On death and dying (1969)
Puerto de la Cruz
June 24th, 2010