Irises
Is this my father’s life or mine?
-Li-Young Lee
………
1.
Surely I should have known
the irises,
deep purple bruises
their yellow tongues on fire
wild flames on the far side
of the house
surely I should have sensed
something
in their silent profusion
2.
I have written fifty poems
father, to find you
still sitting in your armchair drowning
in the television. There was one
for your mother’s black hair
shocked gray in one day,
one for your kid brother’s missing body.
After you told me with so much sadness
how you found a bone near the barracks
choked down every ounce
of it I wrote another. I place them all
in your palm.
you return them to me
irises,
something alive
organic. Fragrance
of meat burning
on an alter.
Fragrance of forgiveness.
3.
father of silence
of stone eyes tearless father
father of the broken
back highway father
of long distances
with no god
wingless father whose language
lies flat on its back and is being raped
the iris’s jaw
is dropped
and silently screaming
the terrible irises tremble
in terror of
what?
4.
In the garden of the asylum at
Saint Paul de Mausole Vincent painted
irises he thought would prevent him
going mad. These are the same irises
in the yard of the house
I grew up in. They grew on
a mound around the same size
as a coffin, long and narrow
like that. The plot was built up
with a squat wall of stones. A few steps
away the walkway leading to
the kitchen door with its small curtained window
and a lock barely hanging for its life to the jamb.
I dreamed again and again a menacing force
on the other side of it
I ran for the lock
but it could not hold and I could
see the monster in the window,
irises just beyond.
tangled, wild.
5.
Tall iris of the strong spine,
sword tongue, proud one, rigid one bend
closer that I might
tell you this secret. How the house
was filled with secrets. Phantoms
in the hallways finding
their way by touch of walls.
I could hear their thrashing
their thumping. Father,
face purpled with anger
at what? Once,
after you hurt us
I thought I heard you
crying. The sound was a ship’s call
far out at sea and going down
and once
you drove away.
We didn’t see you
for three days.
6.
Tissue-tongued irises,
fragile tongues torn, transparent.
By fall the muddled masses
bent at the knee
by winter fronds brown
petals brown, and wasting
irises folded in their open air grave
your mother and father
folded and I have never seen you
cry for them
oh powerful purple faced one
when will you mourn for them?
I am offering you this iris. Bring it
back to me.
I have forgiven you.
Last night I dreamed
that you died. I was terrified
I would not cry for you
but then I couldn’t stop. You were dead
but standing, your pallor
an awful gray. You were doing silly tricks
one where it looks like your thumb
has come undone
then made whole again.
You wanted me to laugh,
covering things up again.
7.
if there was a rending of clothes
if ashes
if spitting a litany
of the foulest swear words
if moaning a howl if tearing of hair
if heaving chest beating
if there were graves…
we might bring
irises that you might know us…
8.
I have taken myself
down this long path
to sunbathe in the backyard.
How could we predict the sheet
on the clothesline shepherding the wind
resurrection of old ghosts
masses of irises
tangled in the corner of my eye
this ruse of becoming
whole? Father,
will you and I ever be done
with this trying to become human?
In my fifty-third year
when I remember the things you said
to me I still feel like I want to
disappear. Sometimes I have to check
the mirror just to see
if my face is still there.
9.
At first the buds are shut tight
an eye closed over in the deepest night
how could we know
this promise of purple, exquisite one
bulbs deep in the earth’s mass grave?
For a while I washed dead bodies
just to see if I could take it. My partner
helps me roll the body on its side
so I can wash her back. How quickly
the blood stills itself
pools in purple petals
so many bodies
sometimes we’d casket four
in a day. Maybe it was my way
of coming to terms.
10.
Winters our gardener
an old guy we nicknamed Ray Bolger
cut back the last of the brown foliage.
How his hands shook when he sat
at the kitchen table while mother made him
sandwiches and poured him beer
to stop his shakes. His eyes
so sad and rheumy
and she was so kind to him.
When he’d cleared out the last of the refuse
there were bulbs exposed at the surface some
conjoined and looking like the stumps
of amputated limbs. So many broken
bodies and father
only to survive that and
every day after that
my constant reckoning
the iris’s tender shoots
each May the bright green air
so utterly unremarkable.