Geffrey Davis’ “What My Father Might Say, If I Let Him Speak”
Thoughts on the softness we allow ourselves to imagine.
What My Father Might Say, If I Let Him Speak
Son: I stayed spooning your mother’s
softly snoring form, as she swelled with you,
month after month. Your voice pierced
the Seattle spring air, and I began to wake
in the early hours, before work, my mind
and body dragged from that other-worldly
cavern of sleep, to watch you flexing your life.
I biked three miles home on lunch breaks
to bottle feed you, begged your mother
to make you wait. Stop turning these details
toward a genesis for a lifetime of hanging on.
I showed you what the living can do
and call love—that a man can rise, coughing
from the ashes of himself,
and go back down again, like prayer.
From Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014)
I have a soft spot in my heart for poems about fathers. The way some people have that spot for the moon and others for birds. The way some people have that spot for the long line and others for the lyric phrase. The way some people love something that bites and others love something that nibbles. Give me a father poem and I’ll weep openly and press a leaf against my chest until my body is dappled in green.
Davis’ poem today reminds me of one of my favorite poems about fathers, Stanley Plumly’s “Sonnet,” which ends with these lines:
I think of him every time I fall in love
how the heart is three-quarters high in the body.
—He could lift his own weight above his head.
—He could run a furrow straight by hand.
I think of him large in his dark house
hard in thought, taking his time.But in fact he is sitting on the edge of the bed
and it is morning, my mother’s arms around him.
I think a lot of fatherly poems owe a debt to the subversive work that lines like these do. I think, also, of the hard work of gratitude — laced with regret — that Robert Hayden models in his poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” a fucking classic.
Today’s poem sits in the complexity of poems such as those I just mentioned. And that’s what I love most about it: it doesn’t do easy work. I mean, look at the title: What My Father Might Say, If I Let Him Speak. Already those two words — “might” and “if” — are introducing a sorrow so steeped in the hypothetical. As readers, we don’t have to imagine the tension. We feel a whole past stretching out behind this poem, a past of deep silence, violence, hardness. What isn’t hard to imagine. What is.
The title says to us: this hasn’t been easy, and it still isn’t. I appreciate the vulnerability of that, the attempt at grace, the anger. Any poem that presents its work as easy is either not working hard enough or is hiding the hard work underneath what it turns itself toward.
And yet, despite the pain of this poem’s title, what I love so much about it is the way it chooses to begin. From a title of restraint, the poem imagines toward something softer. Notice that first image:
I stayed spooning your mother’s
softly snoring form
And notice the softness of the words themselves, as they unfurl themselves from your lips: spooning, softly, snoring, swelled. And, lest we forget: Son.
A poem is always engaged in the dreamy and dirty labor of imagination. Each poem is a testament to what we are capable of imagining, or reimagining, or turning this way and that in the same light. And the softness that this poem begins with is an imagined one. It has the beauty of something imagined, like untouched snow on an open field. It isn’t hurt yet. It isn’t dead.
Today’s poem shows us not just that we can imagine softness, but that we can imagine softness even in the aftermath of pain, or even as the large words of a title laced with hypotheticals looms over our attempted work, our day in and day out existence. And yet even the poem shows us the danger of such imagination, the harsh sorrow that sits as a reality against softness, such as when the father speaks:
Stop turning these details
toward a genesis for a lifetime of hanging on.
This is why this poem is so complicated, why it is an act of subversion. The father’s litany of tender actions does not absolve him of whatever may or may not have happened between him and his son, and yet — it is the son who puts those words in the mouth of his father, the son who tries to imagine his father caring for him and then pushing him away, and the son who does not, as the title suggests, let his father speak.
The poem holds all of that and more. It holds the tenderness of child rearing and the hardness of a burdened and burdening masculinity. It holds the weight of what can be “call[ed] love.” It asks: What does resurrection look like?
And what does it look like? What does it mean, to be born again, as this poem enacts? And how about that phrase: a new man? Is there such a thing? It seems it would be better to acknowledge what softness we are capable of imagining at the same time as recognizing all the hard hurt of our resentment. Life is lived in between. It carries on, regardless.
In the first poem of this collection, “What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse,” Davis writes:
And my father
walks along the tired fence, watching horses
and clouds roll down against the dying light —
I know he wants to become one or the other.
It is that recognition of the tired resignation, the competing desires, the wish to be in the world or out of it that makes me adore Davis’ work. There’s a gentleness there. There is a hand that wants to hold the hand of the father, in spite and despite it all. Or, at the very least, there is a hand that does not want to become a fist.
I find that refusal to imagine violence into the future to be the work of sonship, the work of writing about fatherhood and failure and desire and loneliness. It is power that asserts itself, and it is violence that is often the consequence of such an assertion. We don’t always rise the way we want to. Some hardness cannot be revised into softness. But grace, when applied, can imagine us into birds, can turn us toward the same light that was always there when, perhaps, we were not facing it. I’ve never seen my father dance. Sometimes it is a joy to imagine it. It, among many things, helps me survive.