'With Such Beauty'

The common word I can least imagine my father ever uttering, at least as supplied by his threadbare lexicon and in the presence of family, is beauty. Not that he was without a rudimentary aesthetic sense. He once made me a bookcase welded out of slender iron rods, crowned with the letter “K” in a circle above the top shelf. From a sheet of steel he cut out a piece shaped like a Scottish terrier, stenciled our street address on it and posted it in front of the house. It’s still there, though new owners moved in long ago. By trade he was an ironworker and welder and worked in metal. Everything he made was heavier than it needed to be. 

His ruling aesthetic, if he had one, was practicality. The things he made were functional and they lasted. He would never have associated beauty with something as inert as a sonnet or sonata. None of this is intended as criticism of my father. He responded to life with what he was given and had no capacity for or interest in theory. The scarlet leaves of a maple in the fall might have struck him at “pretty,” but that was of little consequence and probably gave him little pleasure.

 

B.H. Fairchild (b. 1942) has a poem, “Beauty” (The Art of the Lathe, 1998), which begins with the speaker and his wife in Florence, looking at Donatello's David in the Bargello Museum. He thinks “how very far we are now from the machine shop / and the dry fields of Kansas.” Fairchild meditates on beauty and masculinity and memory, and his poem reads, in part, like a joint autobiography of my father and me. It concludes:

 

“. . . and we walk

to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen

along the casement, and looking out, we see the city

blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings

taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way

the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,

would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.”