TRAGIC Poem: Letter to my Father, by Deborah Bachels Schmidt

In amber lamplight of earliest memory,
I’m sitting on your lap in print footie pajamas,
turning the pages of Mother Goose.

I was so young when we lost each other,
sundered by divorce. Over and over
I woke from nightmare crying out your name,
powerless to bring you back.

For years, I could only
finger the dark, dinted braille of type,
teasing your voice from scant letters.
Not until I was grown could I find you.
We listened to Beethoven
and sailed the Blue Jay on the bay,
just beginning to be easy with one another.

And then I lost you again
–to a distraught lover
with a gun from the glass cabinet
where your rifles leaned in a sinister row,
cleaned, oiled, waiting.
No one let me see you.
The casket was closed.

Numb, beset by the urgency of sleep.
I did not recognize my own grief
in the shape it took.
Only when I heard the Élégie
from the Tchaikovsky Serenade,
the tender contrary motion,
treble and bass pulling apart
and drawn together, filling the hall,
the same hall where I once played for you,
did the tears come.

You have been gone now
for almost as long as you lived.
I am left to imagine you,
filtering resentments from my mother’s stories,
weaving fantasy, memory,
and gleanings from old photographs,
tracing your hands, your eyes,
the workings of your mind, in mine.

You are incompletely remembered,
partially invented, wholly longed for.
I am still yearning
to crawl up into your warm lap
and open Mother Goose.