Six Elegies For My Father
1. entrails
on the day my father died
the morning headline
blared a scandal:
medical students had abused
donated corpses, mother's voice
was stronger than it had been for years
I read nature was more
anarchic self-organisation
than central state and even men
who experienced the Great
Industrial War of wired trenches
did not become pacifists, helped
Helmut butcher the two sheep
I'd killed the week before
a brief gust of weak
nocturnal rain did nothing
but wash a little dust
off the iron that night
I dreamed I was
giving a man
instructions on how
to train his unruly dog
2. janus
descending down
into a cellar cool room
garage smells like the storeroom
at Coca Cola my father worked in
where I waited after school
for the long drive home
from Naremburn now
his body a marble sculpture
white blotched skin in white silk
soft cold hands crossed
to touch lightly as the bird
he nursed and released
from the opened window
when I was five the face
in deep sleep the mouth
opened on the chipped
false tooth the eagle nose
the strong skull
reasserting itself
through the temporary skin
a bad shave but beloved
eyebrow spikes to stroke
earlobe I once sucked
over fifty years ago
in a morning bed
familiar as father
from the left
from the right
a frozen sleeping
stranger
3. over, through and under
extended turbulence over India
jumbled voices in the head
snatches of old tunes
perforating the engine hum
waking over the Ukraine
where his childhood was
Vinnitsa, Zhitomir, Lvov
where horses still pulled
grandfather Arkady's artillery
through the thawing mud
on the screen a little plane
tracks its caterpillar pilgrimage
over another 1500 kilometres
of green and virtual land
towards a farewell
to my dead father
at the bottom of the plastic tray
under the Malaysian rice breakfast
a real palm leaf
4. liminal
not at the funeral parlour
(burst water pipe)
not at the garage cool room
(was no punk)
not at the chapel
(no coffins allowed)
rather: 17 kilometres
through the jungle
of autobahn clover leafs
and agribiz wastelands
to the invisible Father
Rhine, centre of the centre
Bingen, mystic Hildegard's
place between the grey concrete
apartment buildings a grime-red
Lutheran church 1904
eternalising the Swedish king
who in the 30 Years War
helped lay waste the land
this coffin is not my father
yesterday's embedded marble king
there/not there during it all
where liminal father liminal son
non-embedded still flying
not home here old friends
dead just cold air
in which candles
and Russian liturgical chant
on CD fight to warm
weave now a shroud
of memory music words solo
tears come and go
come and go
in the car going back
mother's voice:
'such is life's end
are we in Bingen?'
5. chrysalis
the ceremony closes
with a Russian Easter Song
the black urn he chose
against his wife's wishes
is embossed with
the icon