My Father Thought Poetry Was a Phase
Twenty years later, he keeps my clippings in his shirt pocket.
My father said the word poet the way other men said the names of diseases. He was a cashier at the State Bank for thirty-one years, a man who believed in fixed deposits, polished shoes, and arriving forty minutes early for everything, and when I was seventeen and told him I wanted to write, he did not shout. He looked at me the way he looked at a torn banknote, something to be handled and set aside, and said, 'It's a phase. Like your brother's cricket. It will pass on its own if you don't feed it.'
I fed it.
I fed it in secret, the way you feed a street dog your family has forbidden you to name. Poems in the backs of physics notebooks. Poems on the last page of the bank's complimentary diary, which felt like a small and satisfying revenge. When my first acceptance came, from a journal so small the editor typed the letters himself, my father read it twice and asked exactly one question: 'How much did they pay?' They had paid two contributor copies. He handed the letter back without a word, and the silence in that room had a texture I can still feel, like wet cement setting around my ankles.
For a while I published under my initials, because he had asked me, in one bad sentence at dinner, not to use the family name 'until it becomes something'. I told myself it was a style choice... It was not. For three years, every acceptance arrived addressed to a person my father had edited.
For most of my twenties we spoke in account balances. Did I have enough. Was the rent paid. Had I considered the bank exam, the railways, the government list of respectable ways to disappear. When my first book came out from a press that printed three hundred copies, I did not tell him. My mother told him. She reported later that he had said only, 'Three hundred. The bank prints more receipts before lunch.'
I stopped going home for a few years. We both pretended it was the train fares.
Then, two winters ago, his heart did the thing that the hearts of quiet men eventually do. My mother called at six in the morning, and by noon I was standing in a government hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and cold tea, holding a plastic bag of his belongings that a nurse had pushed into my hands.
His watch. His glasses. His shirt, folded with bank-cashier precision even by a stranger. And in the shirt pocket, a square of paper folded down to the size of a stamp, so worn along its creases that it had gone soft, like cloth.
It was my poem.
The first one, the two-contributor-copies one, twenty years old. The newsprint had yellowed to the color of weak chai, and the folds had been opened and closed so many times that the paper had forgotten how to lie flat.
The nurse saw my face and misread it. 'He showed it to everyone in the ward last year, when he came for his check-up,' she said. 'He tells people his son's name is in print. Aren't you the son?'
Last year... Check-up... Ward.
There was a whole geography of my father's pride, and I had never been shown the map.
He survived. A bypass, two stents, and a diet that offended him personally. While he was recovering, bored and furious in a room he was not allowed to leave, my mother sent me up to the loft for his old grey trunk, the one we were never permitted to touch, because she needed his college certificates for the insurance. Under the certificates, wrapped in a plastic bag from a shop that had closed before I was born, was a notebook. Nineteen sixty-eight to nineteen seventy-four. Poems. His.
They were not good and they were not bad. They were young, which is a category all its own. Poems about rain on hostel windows, about a girl referred to only as S., about his own father's cough. The last one was dated three weeks after his father died, the same month he left his degree half finished and took the bank job to feed six people. After that, blank pages... Sixty of them. I sat on the floor of that loft and turned every single one, as if a poem might still be hiding, and the blankness went on and on like a road out of a town he never got to leave.
When I brought the notebook down to him, he looked at it for a long time... Then he said more words about himself than I had heard in forty years of being his son.
'It was not a phase for me either,' he said. 'It was a door. I closed it myself, and then I stood in front of it so no one would know it was there. When you started writing, I was not angry at you. I was angry that the door opened for you so easily.'
He had never been trying to kill the poet in me. He had been trying to spare me the funeral he had already held for the one in himself.
I used to think forgiveness was a single door swinging open. It turned out to be more like his physiotherapy: small, repeated, unglamorous movements, twice a day, whether or not anyone feels like it. He asked about my writing. I answered without flinching. I asked about S. from the notebook and he went so red that my mother demanded the story, and did not get it, and has not stopped asking since.
Last year I typed up six of his college poems and put them where new writers actually get read, on a page that runs profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. I listed him by his initials, the way he had once listed S. Strangers left comments. My mother read every one of them aloud to him, twice, including the punctuation.
One comment said his rain poem deserved a wider door. He asked me what a comment was. Then he asked me to read that one again.
He retired with a full pension, exactly as planned. What he does now was not exactly planned. He walks to the market every morning with the newspaper, and in his shirt pocket, in a plastic sleeve my mother finally bought because the constant folding was destroying the evidence, he carries the latest clipping. Mine, and lately, one of his.
He shows the milkman. He shows the pharmacist. He shows the young men at the bank where he no longer works, taking his time, letting them ask.
Twenty years he called it a phase, and he was right in a way he never intended.
It did pass.
It passed from him to me, and now, some mornings, back again, folded to the size of a stamp, riding around the market in a shirt pocket, directly over the repaired heart.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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