Nobody in this poem is described. We never learn the father's face, his job or his voice. Instead Hugh Seidman gives us a door. "Abstraction on His Father" opens like a page from a building manual: the fire doors "open out going down, / hinged at the left / to the outside frame." The title's word "abstraction" turns out to be almost literal. A person has been boiled down to mechanisms and measurements. The central idea seems to be that a man can be known, and lost, through the structures that enclosed him, until all that is left is a sealed place in memory.
The second movement brings in the only human figure, and he barely registers. "In the intricacy of the stacks, / tier on tier, / turning always right / it was possible / for a man / to remain unnoticed." The poem never says what the stacks are. The word suggests shelving, so a library or archive is a fair guess, but that is an inference. What matters is the maze: "tier on tier" stacks the phrase on itself, and "turning always right" makes the route sound like a habit. The line breaks do the rest. "For a man" hangs alone, then "to remain unnoticed" follows. This is also the poem's only full stop, as if invisibility were the one thing settled. The phrasing is hedged, too: "it was possible," not "he did." Because of the title, we read this "man" as the father, but the poem lets him stay generic.
Then the grammar falls apart. Capital letters and punctuation disappear, and the lines become a pile of nouns and one strange gesture: "incurved / the frame's vault / the door's metal / the hand opens / in the gesture / of closing." The sentence has lost its logic, and so has the hand. An open hand that is also a closing one can be read as offering and refusal at once. "Incurved" suggests something curling in on itself, like a shell or a fist. "Vault" brings in banks and tombs. In the poem's most human image, a hand is shown by what it does, and what it does is contradictory.
The ending returns to formal diction, almost like testimony: "There is the instance / of the fire door / locked to rescind / the forces of heat." "Rescind" is a word for cancelling a decision, and it sounds odd next to fire. The door is built to annul heat, to hold it back. Then comes violence after all that calm: "slammed full / to the cores / of memory." The sounds link the pieces. "Doors," "forces" and "cores" share an echoing o, so the door and the memory are tied together by sound as well as sense. The metaphor is that memory works like a fire door. It keeps something hot behind metal, and it can be shut hard.
The last two lines are the most open to interpretation: "& the artless rest / to him who desires." "Rest" can mean repose or what remains, and both fit. The poem has just been carefully crafted, so "artless" reads like an admission that what survives of a life is plain and unadorned. The ampersand is the one casual, speech-like mark in an otherwise cool text. "Him" echoes the title's "His" but never says who he is. He could be the father, the speaker, or any reader who wants more than the poem will give.
Formally there is no rhyme and no steady meter, only short, mostly two- or three-beat lines. Enjambment makes the reader step down line by line, as in "open out going down." The directions "down," "right" and "left" give the poem a sense of being led through a building without being told where to. Nothing is confessed.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. A conventional tribute to a father would tell us what he was like. Seidman's poem withholds, and the withholding is the portrait. A man who stayed unnoticed is remembered through hinges, frames and locks, and the reader is left standing at the door, unsure whether it is open or shut.