"The Power of Love"

In Bloemfontein, South Africa
where I was speaking
at an arts festival,
sixteen thousand kilometres away
from the town I grew up in,
I heard a band covering
The Power of Love.
Between events I was wandering
through an outdoor market
looking for souvenirs
when the first bars rang out
like a long distance phone call.
I sat down on a rectangle
of grass and ate shawarma.
A man who resembled
my father walked by
wearing khaki shorts
and swaying like drunken wheat.
Father, I wanted to say,
Sit down. Eat with me.
I wanted to call a stranger
father while my own father
sat in a tube-shaped urn
on my desk at home.
The lyrics grew
into a dramatic lather
that floated over to where
I was sitting and it would’ve been
easy to just let it power wash
the grief from my heart.
Many people have given
me advice since he died.
Maybe even you.
Yes, you. You who are
reading this now
in that little room of yours.
Maybe you were
very sorry for my loss.
Maybe you said,
your grief is Lake Michigan
on a map of time. Or:
He is with you always,
your father. He’s a pattern,
a chemical reaction
that lights up the EEG
like a Christmas tree.
Sitting in Bloemfontein,
my body blasted by time change,
Canada calling to me,
I could’ve almost believed
there was meaning in it—
but I don’t consider suffering
a class people can ace
to become better.
My father is not a part
of my grey matter
where memory skips stones
out onto the gushy surface
of nostalgia lake.
My father is not
a door to unlock.
I can’t step on through him.
He’s dead—I checked.

*

Less than a week later
I would be standing in London
in the Tate Modern
watching a video art installation
of a woman lowering
her feet into a bowl of blood
and pacing the streets
of Guatemala City.
At even intervals she placed
alternating soles
into her metal bowl and kept going.
I wonder how long she walked—
the recording is fifty-nine minutes.
I watched her while tourists churned
in many languages through
the gallery around me.
Then I looked at the Kandinsky,
at Jenny Holzer’s hallway of quotes,
and several b-side Picassos.
Then I looked at my wife
and said, I want a sandwich.
Maybe I meant ham.
Maybe I meant simple
comfortable carbohydrates
to remind me of home.
Home, where a property
management company
keeps ripping out our floors
and our cat knocks
between rooms in the cone
she’s velcroed into to stop her
from chewing up her feet.
I named her Grandpa
because we got her
a few weeks after my father died,
but didn’t realize that was why
until months later.
I thought I just liked the name.
Slow emotional jet lag.
My whole life rotating
before me like a column
of shawarma meat.
Little tube of ashes
resembling a kaleidoscope—
what would I see
if I could peer through it?
The suitcase he carried to Canada—
small as a shoebox—
propped up on my desk
like a bit of immigrant kitsch.
His Calgary Flames coffee mug.
His empty poker wallet.
My shitty dead father
art installation.
The Tate Modern, sitting
on the riverbank, giving
London the brick finger.
Us sitting between The Tate
and the Thames—a little drunk,
a little jet lagged and in love.

*

In April in a beige train car
in southern Ontario, I read
Sally Rooney’s second novel,
all of it in one nauseating gulp
and I’m the only one I know
who doesn’t wish
for a different ending.
Let your characters be
complicated and miserable,
novelists—god knows
it’s how I’ve felt often enough
even in London, England
seeing things I’d dreamed of
because my feet were swollen
double from the heat.
It’s something that’s only started
in the last year or two—
the swelling, not the misery.
(Everyone who knows me
knows how prone I am
to being totally miserable.)
In that beige train car
in Southern Ontario I realized
I would never be Sally Rooney,
never be very young
and very famous.
That station passed ages ago.
With a plastic ham sandwich
I watched the last
of my youth vanish
behind working class hills.
The last of my youth
looked just like another Tim Hortons,
which serves burgers now
as well as the same people
it has always served,
my father and me.
You can’t spell human
without ham, is something
I once tweeted.
As is, It’s obvious why
we call money ‘tender.’
A poet I admire followed me back
on Twitter and unfollowed me
a couple of weeks later.
I can’t say I blame him,
but it hit me right
in the daddy issues.
Then I walked into a room
of Rothkos and found my wife
hating Rothko so perfectly
I almost couldn’t argue with her
but of course I did.
She who will meet me anywhere,
and even used family Air Miles
to fly to London
and stand with me in rooms
of art and hold my hand.
Most days it seems impossible
I’ve loved someone this long,
screaming, I am your lady
and you are my woman,
at her as she weaves us
through semis on the I-5
to some conference or other.
It’s why I need Rothko
and all of his gooey purple blues.
It’s why hotel rooms
and Celine Dion power
ballads were invented.

*

For Valentine’s Day
we flew to Las Vegas
and she watched me rub
my father’s ashes into
American dollar bills and feed
those American dollar bills
into slot machines—
the bills were rejected
then accepted with a waterfall
of sound effects—
watched me flip his ashes
into fountains on copper
American pennies.
Trump Hotel sat at the edge
of our sight line
like a fat gold tombstone.
That was the week
Celine wasn’t playing Vegas,
so we went to The Backstreet Boys
whose backup dancers
danced better than the boys
themselves because—no matter
how much they are loved—
even 90s heartthrobs turn forty
and throw out their backs
trying to get down, get down
and move it all around.
Time’s the greatest hit, boys.
She piggybacked me back
to our hotel room
in fake New York, my feet
two pool floaties of pain,
and laid me down on a duvet
patterned with skyscrapers.
Was that before or after
I threw myself off
the fake Brooklyn Bridge?
Before I drank a meter-long
margarita and we watched
Hoarders all night.
Before we drove to Portland
for a conference but after
I went to Parksville
to visit my mom who
may never approve of us.
I go away so often I worry
she’ll leave me, but going away
is my job. Going away
and having feelings
and writing them all down
is my job. As is standing
in rooms and reading
my feelings out loud
to strangers. Her job
is replacing old windows
in people’s homes,
switching them out for newer
windows with better insulation,
and on my more miserable days
I believe only one of us
is helping people see
the world. It isn’t me.

*

In June this poem was invited
to speak inside
an Anne Carson poem
and given a bus ticket
to Hades, a decent per diem.
Then I woke up, neck tweaked
from the ancient Greyhound seat,
crumpling it somewhat.
Hades was just a gas station,
a bar with a sign proclaiming
untended minors would
have their skeletons leashed
to Cerberus, a busted
VLT machine, a barmaid
named Magda who nodded
the way to my dad’s—
Tell him to come pay his tab.
I followed a tidy row
of tent trailers
alongside a river I assumed
would be filled with ghosts,
but when I strode closer
it was filled like a regular river
with water and garbage—
shoes, car parts, Celine Dion CDs.
When I found my father, he was just
tending a little flower patch
and seemed—finally—ok.
He looked up at me over
his darkly glowing stargazers
and set his spade down,
so he could show me
a special moss. Orange alfalfa,
beaded with mercury,
it grows from memories.
Then he led me
into his little camper
and poured me a beer
the colour of 1997.
You can drink this, he said,
but better not eat anything.
He turned on his television.
I wished him a Happy Father’s Day
and asked him why
he had to go away.
He looked out through
his kitchen window and squinted
as if it was a kaleidoscope, glowing
with all the busted up
bits of his life swirling
together as weather—
a song that played and played
on the radio for sixty-six years,
a hit the artist was sick
of singing. He saw all of it
and said, Shit happens.
Maybe he meant his death.
Maybe he meant root rot
in the underworld.
Maybe he meant life is a series
of people you have
to learn how to leave
or sometimes you take a cow
to the market and come back
with a palmful of pomegranate seeds
and no daughter.
He could’ve meant anything
but I want to believe
he was trying to say,
Sometimes I am frightened
but I’m ready to learn
of the power of love.