Starting In Again

Monday brought clouds to the beach and thankfully a decrease in the number of people coaxing their elderly mothers into the Atlantic surf. A bland day mostly, but one stirred for me by another spoonful of magic from a poet I first discovered last March with a poem from her remarkable 2006 collection, Dark Alphabet. The poet is Washington state native Jennifer Maier, a writer whose work has appeared in American Poet, Poetry, The Mississippi Review and since 2007 been featured five times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Dark Alphabet, won the Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry First Book Award and was named one of the Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets.

The father figure is for many a powerful ingredient in the roller coaster mix of experience and emotion that defines childhood and youth, and for some perhaps, the years long after that. Even in those homes where the father was an absent figure, that absence was ingredient enough to create its own psychology. We are all to some degree haunted by the memory of a father’s words and some of us even imagine scenarios in which a deceased parent talks to us across the gulf separating life and death. According to Jennifer Maier the seeds of her writing were planted early in life when her father read poems to her she little understood, but managed in time to absorb their rhythmic cadences. In her poem “My Father’s Platitudes” Maier has an ‘encounter’ with her deceased father, but takes his appearance and his words with a large grain of salt.

MY FATHER’S PLATITUDES

I’m in the kitchen slicing bread for a sandwich

when he starts in again, my dead father, with his advice;

only it’s not his treatise on how we should all listen

to Thor Heyerdahl, whom was a true genius and not the crackpot

everybody said he was, or why I should swap the IBM

for pure gold bullion on account of the Jews.

One day death will catch up to other technology

and the words of the dead sail effortless through dry space,

but now they arrive random as coconuts,

sodden as crated wreckage.

I watch him waving from the shore, making big

hand signals, like castaways in the movies.

It’s me, he calls, your everlovin’ father,

and he looks okay, though not as I remember him,

young in dress whites and epaulettes,

or later, skeletal on a raft of empty bottles,

his soul tied to the mast like a soiled undershirt.

I’m slicing a tomato at the equator, like he taught me.

A dull knife’s more dangerous than a sharp one, he shouts,

sawing his hand back and forth in the air. I test the blade

with my thumb, thinking about knives and danger,

about what I would defend with my life.

ARE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE, GODDAMMIT! he yells,

mixing me up with my brother, but I have theories

of my own, and I tell him that even mice have their share

of timid glory, outwitting the amber eye that’s stalking them,

carrying crumbs home to the little ones, not crawling

into some rat hole to die.

Well, life is a shit sandwich, he says, holding it out

to me like spoils from a doomed vessel.

That’s a good one, I say, and take it as my portion,

his gift from the fathomless reaches between us.

If Only

Second guessing. Doubt. Regret… Even the weakest of us knows that post hoc grumbling about the reasons why promises nothing in the way of justification or comfort, and in the end, is a futile exercise. But does that understanding stop any of us from trying to connect the dots? We are all chronic disassemblers of our misfortune, our mistakes and screw ups. Oh, if only… Why didn’t…? But I didn’t know… It happened because… All after the event, all post hoc, a slippery grasp at the elusive gift of hindsight.

A native of Washington State, Jennifer Maier teaches literature and creative writing at Seattle Pacific University and serves as an associate editor of Image journal. A native of Seattle, she is a graduate of the University of Washington and Tulane University. She began writing poetry as a kind of procrastination to avoid studying for her oral exams. Her first poem, a mock heroic paean to the giant flying cockroaches of New Orleans succeeded in getting published though it failed to cure her phobia for cockroaches. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Mississippi Review and been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her first collection, Dark Alphabet, won the Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry First Book Award and was named one of the Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets. A second collection entitled Now, Now is forthcoming.

“Post Hoc” appears in Maier’s book, Dark Alphabet. The poem cleverly and with a an enjoyable dose of humor points out the folly of constructing excuses after the fact.

Post Hoc

It happened because he looked a gift horse in the mouth.
It happened because he couldn’t get that monkey off his back.
It happened because she didn’t chew 22 times before swallowing.
What was she thinking, letting him walk home alone from the bus stop?
What was he thinking, standing up in the boat like that?
Once she signed those papers the die was cast.
She should have waited an hour before going in; everyone knows
salami and seawater don't mix.
He should have checked his parachute a seventh time;
you can never be too careful.
Why didn’t she declare her true feelings?
Why didn’t she play hard to get? She could be out at some
nice restaurant right now instead of in church, praying
for the strength to let him go.
It all started with that tattoo.
It all started with her decision to order the chicken salad.
Why was he so picky?
Why wasn't she more discriminating?
He should have read the writing on the wall; listened
to the still small voice, had a lick of sense. But how could he when he
was blinded by passion? Deaf to warnings? Really dumb?
Why, why, in God’s name, did he run with scissors?
If only they’d asked Jesus for help.
If only they’d asked their friends for help.
If only they’d ignored the advice of others and held fast
to their own convictions, they might all be here, now,
with us, instead of six feet under; instead of trying to adopt
that foreign baby, instead of warming that barstool
at the Road Not Taken Eatery and Lounge, wondering how it might all
have been different, if only they had done
the right thing.