My father is having an affair with God
Last night he picked up his phone and whispered to the other end that
he would be there soon
Shoved his keys into his jeans and slammed the door
Left my living room pregnant with cologne scented silence
Three hours later I knew he was back because
his headlights danced on my bedroom walls and cast
phantom masks on my knick knacks
He sat in his car for twenty minutes before the lights went off
I imagine he emerges from His chamber each night
tangled in white shrouds
the star kissed linoleum tiles,
reminding him to get home
He has another life
Before God came into the picture my dad was
the first act of a Greek tragedy
He had it all figured out and I knew him well
I thought
I knew him so well
The Rabbis teach you to admire those people
Preparing the dead is the kindest deed you can do
they say
My father, I guess
I admire him
Mom says “It is not easy to do His work”
while she prepares his dinner
She says she is proud of him, when I ask
but
she doesn’t say she tried once and
couldn’t stop hearing voices
Seeing their profiles beneath white sheets
When I was seven, my brother and I saw a movie where
a man’s face melted off like jelly
We held our palms on our eyes and screamed but my dad just laughed
and then I noticed
his eyes colorless and sunken like
a corpse
regarding death with ease
a rendezvous, a lover's bed
This poem is really beautiful. It is well structured and clear and paints scenes that clearly have meaning and importance to the poem and life in general. The main thing that felt awkward to me was that the opening line "my father is having an affair with God" (which is a stunning opening by the way) only carries through for the first two stanzas and then entirely drops away. It is a very harsh entrance that automatically engages (which is why it is so stunning) and kind of takes over the poem with that image so by it just disappearing it kind of feels like signing on for a specific ride and then discovering it is something completely different. I think maybe just bringing it up again in the last stanza could help with this. Over all fantastic and i really enjoyed reading it.
ReplyDeleteThis is an intriguing memory artfully told. Nothing is left ambiguous but neither stated in a conventional way. The reader's voice behind the words is made especially clear: childish yet understanding, spunky yet sobered. The interjecting your mom's reflections was also a cool choice in adding to this picture of your father.
ReplyDelete"My father is having an affair with God" - wow, that is a provocative line. I am impressed (!). I think you should bring that detail in later again, otherwise it we forget about it, and its such a wonderful metaphor for the 'chessed emes' which your father does. Perhaps after the line "The things he does for God", add in something about how its an affair.
ReplyDeleteThis poem is well-written. I like the simple, blunt, language. It feels genuine, and very down to earth.
The showing/ description is excellent. ex: , headlights dance, melted off like jelly, sunken like a corpse. Nice use of specific verbs - shoved, whispered.
Minor thing - I think writing out the number looks more polished than using the actual number symbol.
Also, maybe add in more punctuation, commas, periods, capital letters before each verse, unless the lack of punctuation is intentional.
The scenes you provide to show us the toll the work takes on your father is brilliant. Instead of writing that "the work he does is hard", you actually show how its hard, what he sees, the contrast between his work and then coming home to a normal life where his kids watch movies about subjects he deals with and how it affects him. The part of him looking like a corpse is so subtle, so profound, such an insight.
You definitely have poetry chops.
Very original! I didn't quite understand how the first line tied in with the poem. But I am sure it has significant meaning. I like how you vividly described your father's actions without actually spelling out what he did. I thought the 5th stanza was very powerful in the way it was written.
ReplyDeleteThis poem was updated at 8:15 on Wednesday, February 7th. Thank you for your helpful comments!
ReplyDeleteWhat a powerful poem! I thought the first line "My father was having an affair with G-d" was a bit ambiguous to start off with. However, I think it's a very strong statement and it's seemed to me like you were conveying an individual's love towards G-d, and that even though physically on earth there's your family who wants as much time as they can get with him-- it sounds like you feel like your father's "affair" is taking him away from your family for a certain amount of time. At the same time your family praises him because you and your family recognize that your father's motives are righteous. I would keep the first line, but I would move it over to another place in the poem where it would fit in smoothely with the rest of the words.
ReplyDeleteAllison Berg^
Delete"is"*
DeleteWhat a powerful poem! I thought the first line "My father was having an affair with G-d" was a bit ambiguous to start off with. However, I think it's a very strong statement and it's seemed to me like you were conveying an individual's love towards G-d, and that even though physically on earth there's your family who wants as much time as they can get with him-- it sounds like you feel like your father's "affair" is taking him away from your family for a certain amount of time. At the same time your family praises him because you and your family recognize that your father's motives are righteous. I would keep the first line, but I would move it over to another place in the poem where it would fit in smoothely with the rest of the words.
ReplyDeleteThis is an exciting start for you in this class. The poem is substantial in emotion and content, grabbing our attention and packing a punch. For a long time, it is a fairly clear narrative, but the last stanzas throw us a couple curves. I have some ideas about the meaning of the penultimate stanza, but I am not totally sure.
ReplyDeleteThe last stanza is powerful, and I love how you use the ordinary scene of a movie theater to make such a complex and interesting point about the father's relation to his own mortality.
Other things: since I am not Jewish, I am not as clear about some things here as others may be, but my initial reading of this poem was that the father works as someone who consoles the dying as they approach their final hour. The speaker in the poem is coming to terms with this and all that it means for the father and the family.
But maybe this is wrong? The line about "preparing the dead" makes the father sounds like a mortician. Should that line be interpreted as "preparing the dying" because preparing the dead means something else. Maybe this is something I do not know about as a non-Jew: maybe the father is someone who is not a mortician per se but plays a role in preparing a body for burial? I'm not sure, but it doesn't bother me much that I do not know for sure. The poem carries me along.
I have some suggestions for improvement, but they are detail-issues that will be easier to address in person during a meeting or in class. Nice work here and great start to the class.
The first time I read the poem, the first line felt like a vestige of an early idea for the poem or a source of inspiration that was never entirely followed through with. I see that you have since expanded the metaphor--and it definitely works--but I have to admit I thought the poem flowed better the first time around. The extended metaphor sometimes feels a bit like it's intruding on the poem.
ReplyDeleteThe last stanza is really powerful.
In general, I thought the imagery in the poem was very powerful.
DeleteI love the idea of your father sneaking out to "have an affair with God"- that you are the family left behind while he engages in this clandestine relationship with "an other". It shows the resentment that you feel, the fear you feel, the worry for him- evident in my favorite stanza-
ReplyDelete"When I was seven, my brother and I saw a movie where
a man’s face melted off like jelly
We held our palms on our eyes and screamed but my dad just laughed
and then I noticed
his eyes colorless and sunken like
a corpse
regarding death with ease
a rendezvous, a lover's bed."
You really knocked show don't tell out of the park here, picking a single moment where you father inappropriately did not show horror at a horrifying moment, capturing his numbness to death, realizing the slow change thats come over him- and I love how the horror movie is no longer the most horrifying, whats more horrifying is that he's not horrified by horror anymore. All those twists and double meanings and situational irony that you embedded in here- Genius, beautiful, applause.