I Introduced My Parents to My Poetry
They sat in the third row, terrified and gleaming.
There are seventeen steps between the back table of Griffin Books and the microphone. I know because I counted them the way you count the seconds of a fall.
For six years I wrote poems in secret. Not casual secret, professional secret. I wrote on lunch breaks in the notes app of my phone, and I kept the finished ones in a folder on my laptop labeled Tax Documents 2019, because I knew no one on this earth, including me, would ever willingly open a folder called Tax Documents 2019.
You have to understand the house I grew up in. My father spent thirty-four years as an electrical engineer and believes every problem has a manual. My mother taught mathematics to teenagers, which means she has seen every form of human excuse and been unmoved by all of them. Ours was not an unloving home. It was a practical one. Feelings were permitted, the way pets are permitted in some apartment buildings: fine, as long as they were quiet and did not damage anything. Poetry was not forbidden. It simply had no outlet to plug into, no formula to check.
When I was fourteen my father found a poem in my school notebook, read it fully, nodded once, and said, “Good handwriting.”
So the poems went underground for two decades and came back up in my thirties, at night, in secret. I took an online writing course with the camera off, doing my homework at midnight like a criminal, learning line breaks from strangers on the internet. I posted under a fake name on a community wall for poets, where nobody knew me and therefore nobody could be disappointed. One poem did unreasonably well there. People I had never met quoted my lines back to me. A bookshop that hosted a monthly reading asked if I would come and read it out loud.
I said yes with someone else's confidence.
Then I did the truly reckless thing.
I had read an essay a few weeks earlier about why safe poems lose, how the poem that risks nothing costs the reader nothing, and how audiences can smell a hedge from the back row. I remember closing the laptop and sitting very still, because I understood that I had spent six years writing a safe life. The fake name was a hedge. The Tax Documents were a hedge. And the safest poem I had ever composed was the version of myself I performed at my parents' dining table every Sunday.
So I called my mother and told her that on the twenty-first, at seven in the evening, I would be reading my poetry in front of strangers, and that I would like her and Papa to come.
There was a pause of maybe two seconds... which in my mother's language is a full breakdown.
“We will be there,” she said, before I had finished the sentence explaining they really didn't have to.
They drove three hours. They arrived forty minutes early, because in my family arriving on time is arriving late.
When I peeked out from behind the poetry shelves, they were installed in the third row, and I will never lose that image: my mother in the good coat she reserves for weddings and funerals, sitting up straight, terrified and gleaming, and my father with his reading glasses on although there was nothing to read, holding the photocopied program like a manual for a machine he intended to troubleshoot.
The bookshop had cut the overhead lights and put a fat candle on a stool beside the mic, which sounds romantic and is actually a hazard, and the room smelled of old paper and wax and somebody's too-strong perfume. Seventeen steps.
Here is what my parents did not know: the poem I had chosen was about my father.
It is called “Maintenance,” and it is about how he loves people in units of upkeep. How he never once said the word love to me but checked the tire pressure on my scooter every visit without being asked. How he replaced the hinge on my bedroom door the week after my worst heartbreak and oiled it in silence while I cried into a pillow four feet away, and how it took me twenty years to understand that the oiling was the sentence, that I fixed the squeak meant something with no formula to check.
I read it too fast in the middle. My hands shook the paper so audibly that I had to put it flat on the stool next to the candle and read it bent over like a man inspecting a wound. And at the line about his hands, I did the thing they teach you never to do.
I looked up.
Courage is not reading the poem. Courage is looking up afterward at the person it is about.
My mother was crying with the total lack of discretion of a woman who has decided the occasion deserves it. My father was not crying. He was perfectly, unnaturally still, the way a room is still after a fuse blows... and he was looking at me as if I were a stranger who had somehow gotten hold of his private documents.
Afterward there was chai in paper cups and small talk with strangers, and my mother told three separate people, “That is my child,” pointing at me as though I might otherwise be misattributed. My father shook my hand, which he does, and said only, “You read too fast in the middle.”
I told myself it was fine... I told myself all the sensible things on the long quiet drive to their house, where I was staying the night. This is who he is. The tire pressure is the poem. Do not ask the man for a language he was never issued.
At midnight I came down for water and he was at the kitchen table with the lights off and one candle lit, which was so unlike him that I checked the ceiling for a power cut. There wasn't one. The printed program was in front of him.
“Read it again,” he said. “Slowly. The middle.”
So I read my father his poem in a dark kitchen at midnight, one candle between us, and when I finished he was quiet for a long time, and then he told me a story I had never heard in forty years. His own father, my grandfather, a man I know only as a photograph, never spoke to him either. He whistled. Different tunes meant different things: come here, well done, we will discuss this later. My father said that in 1974 he wrote his father a letter, the only emotional letter of his life, and carried it in his shirt pocket for a month, and never gave it to him... and does not remember now what it said.
“I did not have the words,” he said, to the candle more than to me. “You went and got them. Good.”
In my family that is a standing ovation.
I found out the rest by accident, two months later, at a petrol pump. He opened his wallet to pay and I saw it folded behind his licence: a printout, quarter-folded, worn soft and furred at the creases the way paper only gets from being opened many, many times.
I recognized my own line breaks.
He didn't know I saw... I said nothing, and I have said nothing since, and I am telling strangers on the internet instead, which he would agree is the correct engineering solution.
We love each other in units of maintenance. The poem is in the wallet. The squeak is fixed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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