Honour the burnt cork, be a
vaudeville man,
I’ll sing you now a song
the like of which may bring your
heart to break:
he’s gone! and we don’t know
where. When he began
taking the pistol out &
along,
you was just a little; but gross
fears
accompanied us along the beaches,
pal.
My mother was scared almost to
death.
He was going to swim out, with
me, forevers,
and a swimmer strong he was in
the phosphorescent Gulf,
but he decided on lead.
That mad drive wiped out my
childhood. I put him down
while all the same on forty years
I love him
stashed in Oklahoma
besides his brother Will. Bite
the nerve of the town
for anyone so desperate. I
repeat: I love him
until I fall into coma.
The movement from “Honour the
burnt cork, be a vaudeville man” directly to the recapping of his father’s
suicide, coming out of the voice of the blackface conscience, is telling. While
on one hand it’s not fair to judge anyone’s grief at a serious loss like the
suicide (or murder) of one’s father, this is a more than tacit charge that the
grief in question, genuine as it might be, has nevertheless been made
theatrical. It has been dressed in blackface and it belts out tunes and tap dances,
does the old soft-shoe and cracks corny jokes, and there it is, a show-stopping,
prize-winning song-and-dance, a showbiz act that brings the house down. Then
the voice, right after “pal” switches abruptly to the poet’s: “my mother was
scared almost to death” and it hints at another thing, again, about the
incident. “He was going swim out with me”, in other words, take me with him—wherever
he was headed. Was that not a threat? His mother was afraid. B. plays the
suicide angle in these poems almost without a break, but evidence seems to
point to his father being shot from a distance. If the father had been making
threats against the mother’s child, probably her as well, then it all resolves
into a different focus, doesn’t it? I know that he revisits this in 145, and
adds something to strengthen this, but I’ll wait. For now, whatever happened,
it was tragic and ugly. But I think there’s more than a hint that B. at some
level knows what happened better than he lets on, and he knows why it happened.
Whatever it really was, there for sure was a family situation flying off the
rails into absolute wreckage—affairs on both sides, crippling debts, suicide or
murder. Uncomfortable, heavy stuff for outsiders to gaze at. From inside the experience—crippling.
Sure. The last part of the poem isn’t showbiz, I don’t think. The showbiz was
an accusation anyway, and though it’s in the voice of the blackface conscience,
of course B. is levelling against himself. But the last lines just seem an
uncomplicated, honest statement, about something that’s always there and that
always hurts. It’s quite human, quite understandable, and sad. You get pinned
by something like this, and all the life’s subsequent choices—the alcohol, the bad
behavior with and against women, the money woes, the obsessive writing, the
brilliant teaching, the public weirdness and disgrace, the public accolades of
genius—it all resolves into a grand public squirming, consequences of the wound
that doesn’t let up. If it has been made theatrical through the art, that’s
part of its character. It’s sad and it’s hellish, and the laughter that rises
from it, and the social missteps and the lifelong faux pas, are sometimes manic
and sometimes just exhausted. Might as well laugh at it, there’s nothing else
left. So I’m aware today of the impact of long-term emotional intensity, and
feeling forgiving of the consequences of that. We all have our crosses to bear—it’s
the oldest cliché going—but some are heavier than others, and life isn’t fair
to an eleven year old about the woes it doles out. For someone with
intelligence and an aesthetic sensitivity, you turn around on your own feelings
and make something of them, and you make something of your own suffering. Don’t
I admire that? On some level, yeah, I think so.
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