Kindness

1

I scatter my father’s papers

across the low lime-washed table in my living room.

I’m not certain what I’ll keep and what I’ll throw out.

A fountain pen, his favourite Parker sits there too. His hand

is elegant—he told me he worked till it was effortless.

My forehead is tall, and his was also. As I age,

the more often his old friends look twice,

shake their heads and tell me I remind them of him. Sometimes

I think they’re right, but when I look in the mirror I see

little resemblance below the brow. At times I approximate

a smile, and draw their attention to the obvious,

“I share more of my mother’s features, surely.”

Mostly I don’t bother now, it’s him they want. Shame

is an inheritance hard to fathom. I wish I were a code-breaker,

for it encrypts the cells.

When I named this innermost shadow, I imagined

I knew my father better, understood what bound us

and kept us apart was the boy he was at seven, who held tight

to his mother’s gloved hand as they watched his Dad—

a middle-aged volunteer checking out for his second war—board

a train for Darwin. I’m told they stood mute

as he pulled out of Central Station.

One Saturday afternoon, before he demented,

he invited me to sit down and address the past.

At some point he told me “You know, by the age of seven

you were a troubled boy…” Words on which

we foundered, words to explain his absence—

for he caught his own version of that train north. I followed

him into a helping profession, shared his belief

in the promise of passage. If it’s covers I’m performing

I hope they’re in a different key.

2

Lately my daughter and I have been talking

more, and it feels good, like some kind of blessing.

The other day we met in a park at the mouth of a coastal lake,

where I my grandson a toddler could play. When it came time

for them to leave, she paused as she buckled him into his seat,

and asked me what I say to people who come to me with their troubles.

I helped fasten in the boy, who was struggling to get free, and replied

“I ask nearly everyone to weigh the tone, the tenor of the voice

they use when they speak with themselves, and whether it’s fit for a child.”

With her eyes on the outgoing tide, she said “Dad,

there are too many days a kind word for myself is the hardest thing to find.”

I wanted to cry out, to wrest her back,

to say “Don’t listen to that murderer inside of you.” But as if struck

I stood there a silent prayer and watched them go.

In the middle of another night, anguish

finally gave good counsel “You could fret over your failings for a year

of wakeful nights and feel no better.” Now I wept, not hard,

but long enough to see into the clear shallows of plain-sight,

where an unreasoned thought survived—

powerless and blind, if I were to love like that, it would be the best of me.

Note; Vasily Grossman, in his epic novel Life and Fate, has the character Ikonnikov, a kind of holy fool, speak of the power of “…senseless kindness…”, and how “It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is.” And finally Ikonnikov adds “This dumb, blind love is (wo)man’s meaning.”