My Father - Part One

My father took me as well to the end of the land—to the vast gray havens of the sea. Always and ever I find his spirit there though he has long since left my simple sight. I need only to walk beneath the cliffs of Half Moon Bay or climb upon the outcroppings of rock into the surf at Monterey to feel the weight of his presence. In those distant days we would sit together on some large piece of driftwood and gaze out upon a foggy sea. He told me his stories of thunderous storms and tragic shipwrecks that once happened all along the California coast. These accounts were vivid incantations and the mind of a small boy easily saw them with spiritual eyes. Such stories—as are told by fathers to their sons—orient us to the universe and put a provident sensitivity into what is happening around and about. My father lived in the depths of things and because he took me with him, I grew up in his world. I began to sense that my tears were somehow related to this ocean brine.

I sometimes get a glimpse his ghost standing beneath a dark and turbulent sky, staring out to sea. His hands are deep into the pockets of his old khaki jacket as he braces himself against the windy Pentecost that blows in with the squalls. He is clean-shaven still, but I remember the intimacies that were permitted me as a child when I knew of a roughness beneath this skin—a roughness that he daily kept at bay. When I was a child, that roughness somehow put a difference between us and connected him to the churning sea. But I am brother to that now. I know the ghost that is looking out to sea is looking not only upon the stories he told, but also on those he keeps to himself. As a young man in the Marine Corps, he spent months upon the deep, living with men who were doomed to die.

Older now than he became, I am sure he owned his own death as I ran off chasing sandpipers. He was looking, as I do now, for the curraugh that carries the soul away.

Immram______________________________

Below the egret of judgment
from this granite outcrop
cormorants launch their dance
into empty space.

Aided by currents
they circle, collapse and climb
above the kelptic web
above the captured wood that drifts.

Like me, they are enamored.
Like me, they are aroused.
But I can only look into the mist
listen for a seafaring psalm

and wait for the coracle to come.

8/8/2002


When I returned to him—the sandpipers having fled and my feet wet and caked with sand —I looked up into the lines of his face. He was so silent and so salty that I thought he stood with God. I trust his silent spirit to the same thought today.