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Countee Cullen
My father is a quiet man
With sober, steady ways;
For simile, a folded fan;
His nights are like his days.
My mother’s life is puritan,
No hint of cavalier,
A pool so calm you’re sure it can
Have little depth to fear.
And yet my father’s eyes can boast
How full his life has been;
There haunts them yet the languid ghost
Of some still sacred sin.
And though my mother chants of God,
And of the mystic river,
I’ve seen a bit of checkered sod
Set all her flesh aquiver.
A giant puffball bulges among
the dried stalks of goldenrod
like a misplaced hope.
I stuff it in my coat pocket & look
around for others, without success.
That evening, I chop its spongy cloud-flesh
into a sauce with clams.
Then, too, there was the spruce tree
a porcupine had recently girdled.
It stood in the dense center of a galaxy
of needles, some fallen pale side up,
some dark green – a pleasing blend.
Out at the feathery edge, a scattered pile
of hickory shells. I crouched there
tracing words with my finger
over & over in the soft dirt,
time to sleep
the work I spend hours in
my father and others
go through my mind
and I receive their legacy
of evening
I went to my father’s wedding
as a long white winter, a doubt,
a fruitless precaution.
Life did not stop.
The way, though poor,
was a good companion.
I left my wife,
my brother, my wife,
my uncle, my wife,
my father, my wife
without a thing.
I accept gray hair,
in which I am finding
my father and my work:
this is the last
lost ice, all
my accounts.
No thinking or cake,
trouble or work
in my absence.
No father or son.
A dead body, I hear,
is not much.
I work to begin
the making of me
out of dirt and morning,
a face of water, an old mask
of my father’s, and three
or four discourses
for children.
Me: my extreme business.
I see my father, that wit,
the war with chance.
My lord Me, we turn.
eloquent lives I fear:
the door to a college
the herring poor
my father’s buckle
alone in the west
her father is now every day
meeting with the end
a tree in a corner
would sing of water
I went by water to my father’s country,
crew buttery as lard, paper ship
to transport me and my tired work.