'This Will Not Be Your Home'

Part of me resists the notion of Father’s Day. Something crass about it, too public and self-congratulatory. Still, my youngest son took me to lunch on Sunday and he paid – a novelty I could get accustomed to. Earlier, David gave me a CD he had burned – Leon Russell, R.B. Greaves, Sam Cooke, a good mix. At the Mexican restaurant our waiter, a guy close to my age with a histrionic mustache, wished me happy Father’s Day. I asked if he was a father and I thought he would hug me. 

I sometimes think that the only significant thing I have ever done was to have three sons. (I know: I hear the theme song too.) All have turned out well. They seldom embarrass or bore me and usually they are good company. Encouraging them, never expecting too much, is by now second nature. I’m no longer the boss. I have no desire to be their best friend but I want them to know they can depend on me for what they need.  

 

Dick Davis’ father abandoned the family when the future poet was two years old. His mother remarried and Davis once told an interviewer that “there were many books around the house, and I was expected to read them like everyone else.” My sons, I think, could say the same. Here is Davis’ “To Take Courage in Childhood” (Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations, Carcanet, 2017):

 

“The humdrum home becomes a spellbound place

Where life’s laid down, indelibly, for good;

This is the meaning of a mother’s face,

Here is the garden that is Dante’s wood

 

“Where you’re to be undone, it seems, forever.

 The florid beasts step forward, and the guide

 Who whispers, ‘This is no time to be clever’ -

 What horrors will you witness at his side?

 

“Remember though, my child, as you descend

 Into the darkness that you’re certain hates you

 This will not be your home. And in the end

 It’s Beatrice, not Virgil, who awaits you.”