Contributor’s Marginalia: Dan O’Brien Responds to Philip White’s “Childlessness”

 

Childishness

Is it pure choice or pure chance that I write

this poem about another poet’s poem

on Father’s Day? A day of surfacing

disequilibrium. Rage, then shame with those

who don’t have a father. Or a father

we never really could stand. Just a man

small with envy and cruelty. “Childlessness”

is a poem so wise with relief and dread

I feel as if I could’ve written it

myself. Had I this man’s gifts. The last thing

my father ever said to me was, When

did you break faith with your dream to become

someone? But I digress. “Hell behind me

and Purgatory open/ in my hand,”

quoth the poet. He’s revisiting Dante’s

Commedia, of course. One will remember

the dog-eared collegiate copy. Laboring

to burn off one’s childhood in the middle

of a tapering life, in the middle

of this forest blind and stern. Not unlike

our poem’s villa. Cataracted “jackdaws

clacking” in the clanging blooms. A lot like

the promontory and the ivory-breasted

waiters of Bellagio. The fogged flurries

in Sewanee, TN. The numinous

threat of Shanghai next week. The Pacific

caerulean shelf a dogwalk away. Luck

sometimes leads me to a good, long nap. But

always “someone else is here, dividing,/

provoking.” What? Guilt? Solitude? This lack

of family, a child of one’s own. This curse

of a “father/ at the door looking in”

on the poet at work. And should the son

meet the father’s spectral gaze, the father

will sit down and stay a while. And who knows

what crime we have in common? The tenor

of Dante invites vivid, disfigured

recollections. Of “pure choice” the poet

recommits to the page. Each time I read

this poem the title “Childlessness” becomes

“Childishness.” As if the father’s lingering

presence keeps me what I am. Italian

children pillaging the park certainly

support my thesis. Or maybe I’m wrong

and the childless one’s of course the father

whose son won’t ever look up, whose son wants

nothing more than to be free of this God

damned ghost.

↔

photo by David Bornfriend

Dan O’Brien was recently a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. His play, The Body of an American, will premier at Portland Center Stage this fall. His poem, “The Dead End,” appeared with Philip White’s “Childlessness” in 32 Poems 10.1.