The speaker of Eileen Adams's "To Father" never quite walks alone. The poem opens on railroad ties, a path built by industry, but the speaker's body is not the only one on it: "I am on your legs sometimes / I am using your eyes / to see." What follows is a list of things seen, and each shows the natural world holding its ground inside a human-made landscape. The central idea is that a way of seeing can be inherited. The father's perspective lets the speaker notice what a casual walker would miss, and by the end the father seems to have become the land itself.
The grammar of the opening is loose and a little unsteady. "I walking on the railroad ties" leaves out the "am" that the next line supplies, as if the poem is still finding its footing before it settles into "I am." The line break after "to see" is the poem's key gesture. The verb hangs alone at the end of a line, and the reader has to wait for its object. Then "Father to see" repeats it, now with a direct address. Seeing is the poem's real subject, and each repetition feels like the speaker adjusting the borrowed eyes.
What those eyes find is damaged but alive: "mussle shells cracked and jammed / Between the pilings." (The poem spells it "mussle.") The shells are broken and wedged into the structure, evidence of a shoreline that has been built over. The judgment stays quiet, though, and the poem moves straight to the blackberry vines, "naked and rusty." That phrase carries a lot. "Naked" makes the vines vulnerable, almost human, while "rusty" is a word for metal, so the plant takes on the colour and decay of the industrial things around it. Nature and city are not cleanly separated here. They are stained into each other. Yet the vines keep "pushing up through concrete and / Around the fence posts." The participle "pushing" returns two lines later, and the repetition turns a small, slow act of growth into a steady force.
Midway through, the poem makes its boldest move. The vines are "Enterweaving earth and sky," a word that seems to be Adams's own coinage, and "father" drops into the line without punctuation. It reads as an address, but it also lets the father sit grammatically inside the weaving. From there the borrowed body becomes cosmic: "your legs," "your star eyes," "your hands of rock and moss." The speaker started by wearing the father's legs and eyes, and now the father is made of stone, lichen and starlight. It is a striking reversal, since the person seems to turn into landscape while the landscape takes on a person's shape. The father who "push[es] back the city" is hard to separate from the vines doing the same thing.
The ending turns to a "her" the poem never names. Judging by "earth and sky" and "seed," the word most likely points to the earth, though the highway in the last line leaves room for doubt. The father is "Laying her to seed in crimson sage / Again making her to seed the highway." The red of "crimson" echoes the "rusty" vines, so rust and bloom share a colour. "Again" suggests a cycle that has happened before and will happen once more, and the sentence ends with no full stop, as though the growth is still going on.
The poem is significant for how much it does without rhyme, regular rhythm or ornament. The lines are short, irregular and unpunctuated, so the reader moves at a walking pace, step by step like the speaker on the ties. It also treats the relationship between parent and child as a way of looking at the world. Nothing in the text says whether the father is living or remembered, and that openness is part of its power. Whether the legs and eyes are a present guide or a memory, what the speaker receives is a belief that the land will outlast the concrete.