When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds

Peter Markus

• Verlag: Wayne State University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814348512
• Thema: Littérature
• Thema: Poésie

Over the course of two decades and six books, Peter Markus has been making fiction out of a lexicon shaped by the words brother and fish and mud. In an essay on Markus's work, Brian Evenson writes, "If it's not clear by now, Markus's use of English is quite unique. It is instead a sort of ritual speech, an almost religious invocation in which words themselves, through repetition, acquire a magic or power that revives the simpler, blunter world of childhood." Now, in his debut book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, Markus tunes his eye and ear toward a new world, a world where father is the new brother, a world where the father's slow dying and eventual death leads Markus, the son, to take a walk outside to "meet my shadow in the deepening shade." In this collection, a son is simultaneously caring for his father, losing his father, and finding his dead father in the trees and the water and the sky. He finds solace in the birds and in the river that runs between his house and his parents' house, with its view of the shut-down steel mill on the river's other side, now in the process of being torn down. The book is steadily punctuated by this recurring sentence that the son wakes up to each day: My father is dying in a house across the river. The rhythmic and recursive nature to these poems places the reader right alongside the son as he navigates his journey of mourning. These are poems written in conversation with the poems of Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Jim Harrison, Jane Kenyon, Raymond Carver, Theodore Roethke too—poets whose poems at times taught Markus how to speak. "In a dark time..., " we often hear it said, "there are no words." But the truth is, there are always words. Sometimes our words are all we have to hold onto, to help us see through the darkened woods and muddy waters, times when the ear begins to listen, the eye begins to see, and the mouth, the body, and the heart, in chorus, begin to speak. Fans of Markus's work and all of those who are caring for dying parents or grieving their loss will find comfort, kinship, and appreciation in this honest and beautiful collection.

Contents

What My Father Did Not Have to Say

Look at Those Birds

The Name of the Father, the Name of the Fish

Practice

House with No Light Left on Inside It

Everything Where I Have Left It

I Take a Walk with the Gods

Brothers and Fathers and Sons

Who Walks in the Rain Walks on Water

The Dark Above the River Is Light

South of White Rock, Lake Huron, July 1979

There Is Singing

Last Song

What the Birds Keep Trying to Tell Him

More Birds Than I Know What to Do With

I Did What I Could to Keep This

The Old Neighborhood

Because I Could Not Sing

The Song and the River

My Father’s Only Son

On the Island in Search of My Father

I Did Not Hear the Loons Until Later

A Portrait of My Father at the End as Sisyphus

Where There Is a River There Is a Light

April 6

On Turning Fifty-Two

No Words

Too Many Days, or Where the River Turns to Lake

When It Is Dark Enough to See

Still Life in Winter with River Ice and Sky

Skin of River and Bone

Walking Out Alone onto the February River

We Did Not Know the Difference

I Am Tempted to Say I Know Nothing

Winter Birds

We Just Wanted to Get Him Home

The Bird Inside My Father’s Chest

What I Know Is Not My Father

Carrying the Fish

What Was Never His to Begin With

When No One Was Looking I Looked

Man on Boat

What in the Night the Moon Makes

When the Light Is Still Present but Fading

Maybe Next Time

The Sentence I Am Trying Not to Write

Slow Dance with My Father with No Music

Still Life with Goose in Mid-Flight

On My Morning Walk I Question What I See

Fishing in the Rain with My Father

Under the Hood of My Father’s ’89 Lincoln Town Car

On What Would Have Been My Father’s Eighty-Seventh Birthday

In the Twilight the Something That Is Always There

Where I’m ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• What My Father Did Not Have to Say
• Look at Those Birds
• The Name of the Father, the Name of the Fish
• Practice
• House with No Light Left on Inside It
• Everything Where I Have Left It
• I Take a Walk with the Gods
• Brothers and Fathers and Sons
• Who Walks in the Rain Walks on Water
• The Dark Above the River Is Light
• South of White Rock, Lake Huron, July 1979
• There Is Singing
• Last Song
• What the Birds Keep Trying to Tell Him
• More Birds Than I Know What to Do With
• I Did What I Could to Keep This
• The Old Neighborhood
• Because I Could Not Sing
• The Song and the River
• My Father’s Only Son
• On the Island in Search of My Father
• I Did Not Hear the Loons Until Later
• A Portrait of My Father at the End as Sisyphus
• Where There Is a River There Is a Light
• April 6
• On Turning Fifty-Two
• No Words
• Too Many Days, or Where the River Turns to Lake
• When It Is Dark Enough to See
• Still Life in Winter with River Ice and Sky
• Skin of River and Bone
• Walking Out Alone onto the February River
• We Did Not Know the Difference
• I Am Tempted to Say I Know Nothing
• Winter Birds
• We Just Wanted to Get Him Home
• The Bird Inside My Father’s Chest
• What I Know Is Not My Father
• Carrying the Fish
• What Was Never His to Begin With
• When No One Was Looking I Looked
• Man on Boat
• What in the Night the Moon Makes
• When the Light Is Still Present but Fading
• Maybe Next Time
• The Sentence I Am Trying Not to Write
• Slow Dance with My Father with No Music
• Still Life with Goose in Mid-Flight
• On My Morning Walk I Question What I See
• Fishing in the Rain with My Father
• Under the Hood of My Father’s ’89 Lincoln Town Car
• On What Would Have Been My Father’s Eighty-Seventh Birthday
• In the Twilight the Something That Is Always There
• Where I’m From
• This Water, This Rock and Dirt, This River
• On My Daughter’s Twenty-Third Birthday
• What Is Always There Even When It Isn’t
• Where What Was Still Alive Was Singing
• We Looked for the Birds to Tell Us
• When the Loons Return to the River
• Bullhead
• Almost Human
• Sheepshead
• What a Fish Is Not Supposed to See
• In a Poem He Might Praise the Birds
• What I Still Feel Inside, or Some Other Darkness
• Bones
• When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
• Not Able to Say It
• There Is Always Some Other Way to Say It
• The Swans Revisited
• The Moth
• For My Mother
• What Did I Know about Work
• Work Song
• Whatever It Was It Was an Honor, Call It a Privilege
• What We Can’t Get Rid Of
• Guilty
• In Greek the Word for Forgiveness
• Only the River Between Us
• We Fish
• Fear and Death Which Is Different Than Fear of Death
• I Am Afraid I Am Going to Forget
• On the Other Side of the River
• So Much of What We No Longer Want
• Dead Man’s Point
• On the River with Time Being What It Is
• Deadwood
• Wood, Wings, Bones
• Tell That to Our Fathers, or On the Eve of My Fifty-Third Birthday, Pointe Mouillee, 2019
• Briefly It Might Have Even Flown
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author