Genesis

Everything Has It's Beginning.
this poem has it's genesis on a monday night
11:30
walking down the street
with just a few speeding cars
for company

i have just finished reading andrea gibson's blue blanket for maybe the 50th time
wishing that i could wave my pain into metaphors like she can
with the effortless ease that her mother's mothers
wove thread into cloth to clothe their children their husbands and then themselves

i feel the only thing i have to write about
is my own inability to feel something to write a poem about
and i think My God! am i to spend the rest of my life writing poetry about poetry?

still walking i pull out my notebook
i flip through the pages
one eye paying only half of it's attention to where i am going
the rest and the other take in these scratched out remnants of poems that never were
incomplete works i pray
do not one day
become metaphors for my life

i stop at the page dated october 7 2007
two words stand on the top of the page
"My Father"
the rest is blank
because what can you say about a man you do not know?

my father and i never talk
never share our stories and i know
this is because his father and his father's father never really talked to their sons they were too busy worrying about the farm and the mortgage and griping about the goddamn liberals in ottawa trying to mess everything up

i think
put my notebook away
the cars are still going past
and i am still quiet

my father does not have a farm
or a plow
or a mortgage
he has a a motorcycle and a backyard
and maybe that's why he was ale to hold me while i cried after my mother asked me if the reason i didn't go to church was because i thought i was gay
and tell me he loved me
and was proud
of me

i remember now that my father once wrote my mother a poem
and that it was the clearest expression of love i have read

Everything Has A Beginning
my Father was mine.