Three lines, no capitals, no punctuation, and a title that is only three asterisks: Andrei Codrescu's poem seems to start in the middle of something, as if we have walked up to a river just as a thought is passing across it. The scene is simple. Someone looks into moving water and sees a father's face, which does not hold still. By the final line the two have merged into a single phrase, "water and father."
The center of the poem is the word "face," which appears four times in two lines and does a different job each time. In "the father's face" it is a human feature, the thing by which we recognise someone. In "the face of the water" it is the surface, a borrowed human word that makes the river a being with its own expression. In "face to face" it becomes the language of confrontation, two parties meeting eye to eye. The repetition makes the father and the water look more and more alike. By the time the line says "they flow," we can no longer tell which of them is doing the flowing.
The verb "comes broken" holds the poem's main ambiguity. On the simplest reading, it is a reflection: the current ripples the surface, and the image arrives in pieces. But "broken" is also a word we use for people, and the poem never says what is broken about this father. He may be old, grieving, defeated, or simply remembered in fragments. Because the poem gives no explanation, the physical image and the emotional one stay fused. A memory of a parent, the poem suggests, behaves like a reflection in a river: you can see it, but you cannot make it stay.
The shape of the poem supports this. The lines shrink as they go. The first is long and slow, about fourteen syllables. The second shortens to about nine, and the last is a clipped five. The effect is of something draining downhill, which fits the "valley" in the middle line. A valley is the low place where water gathers and where it travels. Whether the poem means this as a gentle slope toward an ending is left open, but the downward movement is there in both the sense and the sound.
There is no end rhyme, but the poem builds a quieter echo. The first line begins with "father" and ends with "water." The last line reverses them: "water and father." The poem mirrors itself, which is exactly what a reflection does. "Father" and "water" also nearly rhyme. Both are two-syllable words with a stressed first syllable and an unstressed "-er" ending, so they sound like variations on one another. The f-sounds in "father," "face," and "flow" also run through the first two lines and hold them together.
The grammar of the last line matters too. In line one the man is "the father's," with an article and a possessive, so he is a specific person with a specific face. In the final line he is just "father," with no article, set beside "water" as an equal. He has gone from a particular individual to an element, a state of being. The conjunction "and" does not even say they are the same, only that they belong together. The poem leaves it at that.
Part of what makes this small poem worth reading is how much it asks of its reader. Nothing in the text tells us whether the father is alive or dead, near or far, loved or feared. What the poem offers instead is a way of seeing: a parent's face, held in the mind, moves like water, never quite still and never wholly lost. The lack of punctuation means nothing interrupts the current, so the reader is carried "to the valley" without a place to stop and decide what it all means. That open ending lets the poem say something a longer, more explicit one might have flattened. A father, in memory, may be less a fixed portrait than a surface on which we keep looking for him.