Unexpected Fire, A Son's Cycle - Songs Of Experience Poem by Warren Falcon

for my father, Major W.C. Falcon, Sr.

And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more...
The weeping child could not be heard...
They stripped him to his little shirt
and bound him in an iron chain...
And burned him in a holy place... - William Blake, from A Little Boy Lost


*

Of Childhood Lamenting - Song of Experience


Might I sing it then?

How many stones he hauled

Not bidden but rough forced

Hand by hand from coagulate soil,

A boy's red wagon rusting

Full of spilled tumble-stones,

Unyielding stars between silent rows.


Brooding father, with

His hoe to weed, or

Ridge to row, or brow

To strike, made of a boy

a mule and plow at

Earth's farthest Edge

Too ill-tilled to nurture

But more to fracture.


The land and boy

Turned by his father's

Bad blood to waste.

Both boy and corn,

Obedient to his and

Greater Hand, grew tall.

He hid there, late summers

In fateful stalks, grew

Small on shadowed

Afternoons reading of

Exiled royal Odysseus

And scores more, native

Born and slave, driven

From homing soil beyond

Surf, beyond tall mountains

And fragrances desert-walled.


He waited, a stone for

A small boy's hand,

Or a God's, to haul him

Or throw,

But it was his father's.


I often stare now at my own to know the difference...


*

Adolescence - Praising.


Cleaning fish on Good Friday 1963,

Fate, then, heavy in a boy's hand,

hoists dead weight to a nail on a tree.

His knife scores firm flesh yielding

beneath freshly limp gills - there is an

instrument made just for this, pincher-pliers

for catfish skin - he grips and tears,

uses his weight down-stripping smoothly

bare to such luscence little ribs of roseate flesh.


Only the overly large head, the ugly face

whiskered within gilded monstrance,

remain pure to form, thin-lipped and

mocking, restrained by depth pressures,

sustained on surface trash, dead things

that sink down it's treasures.


Tenderly sing, then, to a nail

a boy's blood catechism -

hands, minds, meant to be stained,

mercy's quality unstrained

neither by will nor gill.

Scavenging flocks gladly fill their

gullets inhaling entrails tossed

in supplicant bins.


*

Middle Age - Awareness of Mortality Sure

Our Mutual Confession


Descending the hill in unplanned rehearsal
for what has become a destined association,
our mutual confession is invisibly drawn.

A ruined one-room church appears,
a cemetery plot weed-hidden behind this
once sentinel house long remote to men
and as present as God, my own presence
is bound to his who stands confounded
now as three, one above grave, one within
it, and me in between, one eye upon him,
the other upon sagging dirt where bones
and a ragged shirt share an unexpected
moment of veils confused in sunlight's
disarray of leaves, wood, of stone and
shadows frozen there, not breathing
for us all in unstoried astonishment.

Here horseflies feast.

Upon weathered stones are only
creases where once were names,
dates, even God's Word, chiseled
by a now unknown hand, an impression
only, one among many, reduced to
no plot but that of Providence left
to surmise swatting at Eucharistic
flies proving only flesh and only
blood, a flood of questions eventually
exhaled, and exhaling still, waiting
besidea white rock with wings,
ignoring fire,

leaning into changes.


*

Middle-Age - Acceptance - Forgiveness


Repose Of Needles

If you need to stand or lie
in the shade for awhile then
do so as farmers do, as does
my father who farms despair
in hot sun then lays beneath
pines in cooler shade to rest,
to dream that activity between
dirt and sky means some lasting
thing in its doing even though
his ruined life cannot make
it right between clouds and
his obsession with weeds.

Between the garden and the
un-tilled woods he rests,
repose of needles and bark,
mid-day sun insisting its
question slowly. Night dawning
he at last in darkness stands
returned from day, a practical
vision of green shoots to come
from blistered hands.

Up hill to the colder house,
he wills himself to life enough,
speaks some words to wife,
arcs widely around silent wary
children and lives to be old.
His loss of memory leaves it
for others to forgive, to live on
in the rich rot of that ongoing
question which nurtures his
memory haltingly, gracefully, on.

Astonished, I have arrived at
love for him who hurt me most,
have learned to obey the odor
of decaying things compelling
hands to dirt. Within the dream
of staying, the tendril and the
heart, my aging body takes on
my father's form; I, too, like him,
am a farmer when I note how
it moves in its winding reach,
rooting, rising, giving horizon.


*

Reconciliation - Radiance:


Psalm

What can I bring to harvest but these
bruised hands, these cracked stones?


Praise to the fruit tree long untended
beneath mendicant stars.


A boy above, his Radio flyer** lightening full,
Reaches to me now en exilio, the farther flung.


Father, my most difficult,
most diffident friend,
My most loving curse,
a strange and fragrant

Grace arrives.


Look.


From unexpected fire


comes frail, brief blossoms.

>>><<<

*William Shakespeare

**Radio Flyer is a toy company, famous for it's red wagons.
The company opened in 1917, the year of my father's birth.