The Sky of His Mouth
When I was a little boy, I pointed to a flock of pigeons over Clark Park in Southwest Detroit and said, “Oiseau,” which seemed a more dignified noun than “pigeon.” My father was a Renaissance lit scholar who wrote and spoke in French and had been teaching me snippets. Grey birds in a grey sky. My father and I would spend Saturday mornings between the park and the Golden Boy Donut Shop on Warren Avenue because my mother worked nights at Receiving Hospital and would use the morning and early afternoon to catch up on sleep. He’d drink coffee and grade essays while I ate donut holes and watched the city buses drop people off at the stop out front. One morning when I burned the roof of my mouth drinking hot chocolate, I told my father that the sky of my mouth hurt. He found the image fascinating and had me repeat it to my mother when she woke up that afternoon.
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My father gave me copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Reality Sandwiches and Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies when I was 12. When I think of that time, I think of reading poems in the basement of my parents’ house. I’d sit in a big plush chair that was destined for the dump and pore over what I didn’t really understand.
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I loved “The Narrows (for Carol Kane),” even though I didn’t know who Carol Kane was because I knew what it was like not to care “about the green leaves in my carpet / about the death of an historical figure.” I read Ginsberg’s “My Alba” and loved how he said he “fainted in offices” and “wept on typewriters.”
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Against a wall in that basement sat a commode taken from an upstairs room in my grandmother’s house where my great grandmother had died. From that upstairs bedroom you could see the big Uniroyal tire hovering over I-94. It was covered over in hard black plastic, but its skeleton was the Ferris Wheel from the 1964 World’s Fair that had once carried Jackie Kennedy and the Shah of Iran high over Flushing Meadows.
I had no idea why my parents saved that toilet. It could have been a scatological figure in an Allen Ginsberg or a Jim Carroll poem though.
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My father would bring his jump rope to class with him to demonstrate stress patterns when he taught Study of Poetry at University of Detroit-Mercy. The jump was a soft stress; the landing was a hard stress. The jump got the breve, while the landing got the ictus. This means that my father, who could recite reams of sonnets from memory, would skip the rope 70 times while reciting “The Beautiful American Word, Sure” by Delmore Schwartz. Or so I imagine, though my father would tell you that English poems rarely scan perfectly, that their music comes through in dark accidents and the mind’s sufficient grace.
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He became fascinated with the music and poetry of Tupac Shakur at some point in the 90s after hearing “Dear Mama” on the radio. He also found it a lot easier to get his students interested in Tupac than Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. He taught “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” and “When Ure Hero Falls.”
He ended up writing and publishing two articles on Tupac. In one, “Tupac’s Quest for Black Jesus: God as Deadbeat Dad and Afeni, the Migdala,” he writes, “Understanding a father-less Tupac Shakur and his syncretic quest for a Black Jesus begins with recognizing how much his life and character are enframed in his mother’s own story. The enframing starts when she is in prison and he is in her womb, life nurtured within life imprisoned.”
In the other, “Tupac’s ‘Holographic Resurrection’: Corporate Takeover or Rage Against the Mechanic,” my father writes about Tupac’s posthumous appearance in holographic form at Coachella 2012. In this essay, he quotes from the first song holographic Tupac delivers at Coachella, “Hail Mary,” whose lyrics he’d been teaching to his classes as a poem. “Come with me, Hail Mary / Run quick see, what do we have here / Now do you wanna ride or die?” before concluding “The crypt is empty, however, and the only trace of a body is this simulation with a dubbed-over voice now proclaiming ‘Makaveli exists!’”
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When we were children my father would take us on bike rides up Evergreen Road to Fairlane Mall. He wasn’t much for designer clothes or shopping, but Fairlane had a hologram store. It was a dark-lit store with various images projected onto and from silver halide photographic emulsion plates. When I think back on it, I remember being rather bored. But my dad had been fascinated with holograms for most of his adult life. He tried to explain how holographic images worked. He said they were pictures of fields of light. He spoke of object and reference beams and three-dimensionality, but I had trouble following him.
He found holographic precursors in Shakespeare’s plays and the paintings of Jan Van Eyck. Hamlet’s father’s ghost was a hologram. Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait was a hologram. There is a mirror on the mantle behind the couple in the painting that displays the totality of the betrothal in miniature. My father writes, “In Van Eyck’s painting, this ‘violent perspective’ is created by the two mirrors, surface plane and virtual, which function like a holographic beam-splitter, a diverging lens that splits the original laser beam into reference and object beams as a means of recording a scene three-dimensionally.”
My dad once told the story about the time in the early 50s that the University of Detroit English Department invited ee cummings to read. The chair wrote a long laudatory note about how cummings was at the vanguard of contemporary poetry and said how honored they would be if he would visit campus for a reading, to which cummings simply replied, “No No ee.” The department kept his response as a memento.
My father saw cummings as a progenitor of code poetry. cummings’ grasshopper performed the Fibonacci sequence, that elegant mathematical pattern found everywhere from Sanskrit prosody to pinecone bracts to computer algorithms. That orderly accumulation of words and matter. cummings was a code poet; Edgar Allen Poe was also a code poet. In an article for the Edgar Allen Poe Quarterly, my father wrote about the way Poe had programmed his poem “The Raven” to achieve its haunting effect. I told him I thought Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” essay was pure self-mythologizing and that poets never tell the truth about their intentions, that even if they remembered their writing process, they’d probably lie about it, especially if, as was true in Poe’s case, it was profitable to self-mythologize.
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Perhaps this piece should be called “My Father’s Shoes.” His shoes are all I saw of him when I showed up to my parents’ house minutes after he died. Grey Nike track shoes with blue swooshes sticking out the bottom of his winding sheet. A cop was in the room determining the cause of death. I flashed back to middle school, a time I really felt bad for him. We’d shown up to play pick-up basketball at my school gym. We bought all our shoes at Payless Shoes at the time. We didn’t have a lot of money back then; my father’s job at a private university paid him only $22,000 a year. A couple of kids a year ahead of me made fun of his white, off-brand tennis shoes and the varicose veins in his legs. I could tell he heard them and it hurt. From that point on, he would buy better shoes and wear tall black socks and long baggy shorts like Jalen Rose to cover up his legs when he played pick-up games. I think of Galway Kinnell’s shoe poem from The Book of Nightmares: “No one throws away / his shoes. The feet / have to die out of them / to be free.”
He gave me a copy of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift when I was in college. It was a sad book; Von Humboldt Fleisher sat up all night rambling about Proust and drinking gin, his talent used up by booze and paranoia. Fleisher was based upon Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz, the poet who was left two days at the morgue after dying of a heart attack in the Chelsea Hotel before being identified.
My father was far from a manic conversationalist, but he loved the Robert Lowell poem “To Delmore Schwartz”: “The room was filled / with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid.” I think that tragic Romantic mode must have been too much at some point. It must’ve been much easier for him to believe that poetry was coded according to mathematics than to admit it helped to be a little off-the-rails, but the last gift he bought me, for my fortieth birthday, was Blake’s The Complete Illuminated Books. It was a beautiful book that reproduced Blake’s copper engravings; through this process Blake was able to print text and image simultaneously by using acid-resistant paint and leaching off the copper around the intaglio with acid so the paint would stand in relief against the plate’s surface.
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The last time I saw my father alive, he was dropping his copy of Milton’s Collected Poetry and Prose in my mailbox after shooting pool at my sister’s house. When I took my father’s class on Milton as an undergrad, he explained during a lecture that after Milton went blind, he’d make his daughters read to him, often in languages they didn’t understand, chastising them when they made errors, and they resented him for this, among other cruelties. But when we chatted on the porch the night he left me that big black book with the chipboard cover, the spine creased and flaking, the dust jacket long gone, we didn’t talk about poetry. Instead he told me I needed to practice my pool game because he and my sister were shooting really well on her new table.
I picked up that book and read “Lycidas” the day after he died and thought about the purpose of the elegy. To commemorate the dead, ostensibly, but it’s mostly there for the living. Because whatever we must pretend about honoring the dead, elegy is a self-ennobling task. “Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed, / And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears, / To strew the Laureate Hearse where Lycid lies.
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When I was a kid my mom would recite Sir Alfred Noyse’s “The Highwayman” along with several poems by Eugene Field and Robert Frost. We’d sit on our big green front porch in West Detroit after dark and she’d speak those poems into the night with a Richard Burtonesque intensity. She also had Poe’s “The Raven” committed to memory. To be honest, I found this tendency of hers embarrassing during my childhood to the point that for a time I hated poetry. Yet those manic recitations seeped in. I still hear poetry in my mother’s voice. And Poe’s, Poe being so far from my father’s taste and scholarly background, appearance in my father’s writing in the years before his death must certainly be attributable to my mother. At the colloquium on his Poe and cummings research after a year-long sabbatical, he called upon my mother to recite “The Raven” from the audience. I think he surprised her. Her recitation wasn’t quite as sharp as I remembered, but it made him smile. He was happy everybody was there.
The second half of his talk was about ee cummings’ poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” which is cummings’ idiosyncratic way of spelling “grasshopper.” My dad’s PowerPoint slides for this part of the talk had rose petals in the background, a visual example of the Fibonacci spiral. His argument was that cummings had programmed his poem according to the Fibonacci sequence. A fractal sequence, each number the sum of the two numbers that come before it.
As I was writing this section the other night, my wife asked me if she could read my essay. I told her no. It didn’t have a thru-line; it was disjointed and I might get rid of it anyway. Bad writing, I told her. That night she dreamed that my dad was in our living room with my sister, my mother, and me, but she sensed she was the only one who could see him. There was no chalkboard in our living room, but in the dream he was writing words on a blackboard. She badgered him into giving her a message to pass on to the rest of us, to which he responded “Buta festa,” which is difficult to translate, but might mean “whore’s party” or “goddamn party.” Which is puzzling because he seemed happy we were all together in the dream. But “buta” (Azerbaijani) or “boteh” (Persian) is a paisley pattern found in Persian rugs, an amalgam Zoroastrian symbol combining a floral spray and a cypress tree. A shape that also happens to be a Fibonacci spiral. My father loved puns, and for this phrase to connote as a multi-lingual pun at once vulgar, enigmatic, and profound would’ve thrilled him.
The more Sarah reflects on it, she toggles between thinking she heard “buta festa” or “butadista.” I find “butadista” in an article about the modernist Italian pro-Mussolini artist Anselmo Bucci. I enlist a friend who speaks Italian to help me translate it. It stumps him. The cognate also puzzles his Italian friends. He emails me Sunday morning: “I asked one of our friends in San Marino. She says, ‘Boutade’ or ‘buta’d’ is a joke, spontaneous, straightforward, and immediate…that knows how to reach the paradox.” He sends a subsequent email and adds, “And Alba, our friend, adds about the ‘boutade’ — The term is a Frenchism. From this root also derives the bouncer at the entrances of discos, one who throws those who disturb into the street. I guess this confuses matters.”
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I don’t tell my friend why I’m trying to find the meaning of this word. He assumes I’m researching Bucci’s art, I think. Torturing these tangential connections and believing your dead father is speaking to you through your wife’s dream would strike many as ridiculous, implausible, pathetic, or all three. Some illogical function of mourning.
I like the idea that my father’s oneiric utterance is a joke that culminates in paradox. I try to elucidate all these connections while drinking wine with my brother-in-law one night. We are drinking a bottle of South African wine, a shiraz blend from the Western Cape conveniently called “Babel.” He chuckles when I posit the theory that my father was communicating to my wife in a dream. He isn’t buying it, he tells me. From his point of view, this word or phrase was obviously concocted in Sarah’s subconscious mind. He says that if people were really ever visited by ghosts the phenomenon would’ve been experimentally verified by now given its preponderance. I tell him that Sarah doesn’t know Persian, Azerbaijani, or Italian. He points out that within a Jungian framework of the collective unconscious, Sarah would still be able to concoct such terms without knowing or understanding them.
My brother-in-law admits that part of his desire to not believe in this stuff is that he suspects that if there is a hell he might be bound for there. When I go home later that night, I pick up the Complete Illuminated Books and read a passage from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “But in Milton, the Father is destiny, the Son, a ratio of five senses & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum … The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Butafista, the Devil’s party. Blake, for whom poetry would not be possible without spectral visitation.
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My father often told this story about the Romantic poet Shelley, one of his early heroes: At the very hour Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, Mary Shelley and a few friends saw his figure pass outside a London pub. The news of his death hadn’t reached them yet, and someone stepped out onto the street to call after him, puzzled as to why he didn’t stop.
The story is impossible. Mary Shelley was at their Italian home, Casa Magni, at the time of her husband’s death, awaiting the return of his skiff, the Don Juan. I wonder where my father got that story. While there was much mythology surrounding Shelley’s death, I can’t find any mention of this version my father told so frequently, and it’s surprising since my father was typically a careful scholar. It’s the kind of tale I’d also like to believe though, despite the evidence.