Notes from the author: I like to say that my father was coughed out of the womb and rolled around in broken glass. He relished his children with a deep and fiery heart, but he was tough as a sack of rocks. He had one hell of a rough boyhood. His mom died of TB when he was six months old, and his father was quarantined with the same illness for a year and half at Herman Kiefer hospital in Detroit. All of this transpired during the Great Depression.
Dad was shuffled about to various family members. No one wanted the cross-eyed kid. That is, until my great-grandfather John Pocierznicki, my namesake, took him in.
Nothing tenderized my father like his children did. His childhood shaped in him a suit of armor that would warm to the malleable when he had seven or eight beers in him. Still, he had this force field around him and it omitted a powerful radiation. I’d stand next to him on the boat trying to push my hand through that force field and just place it on his back. But his energy uttered a clear and irrefutable message: don’t come anywhere near me with that thing called tenderness.
My wife had cancer seven times so we could not have children. What an irony that Julie and I came to adopt my own father under the auspices of an African American boy from the guts of Detroit. Martell was a blueprint of my father, and they recognized each other instantly, as soldiers do.
W.H. Auden, when asked in his old age what poems he would place in a collection of his work he most admired, responded, “The volume would be depressingly slim.” Of all the ways I have failed as a wordsmith to capture my father’s wild, abrasive, and boyish nature, my “Our Romance” tale gets at some of the heartwood of what he was made of.
The past couple of years I’ve been writing a memoir, The Blood and Light of Memory. I’m trying to harvest a few crumbs of my family story along with the Huckleberry Finn adventures I had growing up in Detroit. I often tell my students, “I’m racing against my own death trying to harvest the moments that are sacred to me." Our bodies are volition engines. There’s that colt kicking incessantly in our chest and even our toes point towards death. We lost Dad to cancer some years back. How glorious it is to steep myself in one memory at a time (hearing my father cry through the papery wall late one night when I was young) and make my father live again. To triumph in this manner over his death. But at some point I realized what was fueling the book is this: I am still starved for his blessing and love even though he’s gone. I could go on and on dunking my pen into the word father as I cross time and never come to the end of it. Every time I puncture that word and draw the pen back into the air, embers are dripping from the end of it.
John Rybicki's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares Poetry and others. His most recent collection, We Bed Down Into Water, is available on Northwestern University Press. His latest book of poems, When All the World is Old, is available on Lookout Books.
Illustration by Kali Gregan