Broken Transmissions

I knew by signs and outright words the mix of watchful joy
that leavened your life: you were my dad, I was your boy.
In the charmed givings of father to son,
the gifts are in the giving though the packages may seem hollow.

By lessons technically imperfect, but indelible for their private zeal,
you explained to me volcanoes and gave me your theory of jet propulsion.
The facts were not the point of the lesson.
And when I took my physics degree I never brought up corrections.
I received that dubious machismo of pulpit and campus:
everything could be explained if mastery were delicious
or mystery too uncomfortable.

Summer weekends jeep road pilgrimage to lost sierra streams
I played at fortress building while you cast to trick the wily trout.
The freeest moments I shall ever know.
You loved the hunt, preparing months to act out the primal dreams.
You gave me a rifle the day it was legal
Initiated among the men in the freezing camp
shivering as the sun rose at your chosen blind.
Not sure my bullet bagged that buck but clear
you were effusive when I got a clean kill in my first season.
I never fished or hunted again once I left your house
Your NRA life membership did not pass down through me
I joined instead the Audubon and the AMC
I did receive a hunger for vastness smelling of pine or storm
for vista with no taint of man, my insignificance at last acceptable.
I don't quite reap the harvest your outings sought to sow
my own kids invite me to trek the hills, I always go.

You said you were born one hundred years too late
and would have been a mountain man.
A student veterinarian, you enlisted for things that never heal
You carefully gave the definition of ecology to grade school me
years before I next found the word in Fuller's Spaceship Earth.
But when they built apartments where you'd grown record crops of corn
you took up applying pesticides for a living.
The anxiety that drove you was how you would provide our next meal.
My slumber is troubled by a vision to come in my children's age
shorn in a dire disabusing from our false bounty of fossil fueled farming
privation of the excess billions it lured to birth.
I did receive your sense of scale
We cannot speak of upsetting nature's balance
when geologic time shows apparently teetering stasis
is merely decay too slow to gauge.




When yearly turning fields, your plowing finally wore
a plowshare to inefficient dullness, then with blacksmith arts
your welder and hardface rod your shower of sparks renewed its edge.
You could repair any truck's spasming engine or a tractor's broken transmission.
Disassemble the ailing machine to a jumble of grimy parts.
Replace the punctured tube or lame spring.
Each cleaned piece at last well sorted on your bench,
you rediscovered from a working store of first principles or just remembered
how each goes back in to a right order and orientation
and exactly how hard to turn the wrench.
Little me watched you as you gashed your knuckles and vividly swore
until the balky fuming complexity was off and running to haul 'til its next session.
You gave me the run of your shop.
but i received the violent impatience you blasted at incompetent tools
and the dangerous confidence that anything can be fixed.

You read us Rudyard Kipling instead of TV night
On long rides in you pickup, you had Housman to recite.
Ale did more than Milton could for you.
But the coming of Yeats does more for me.
I must be of my generation, expecting more to be disturbed
Than to be certain or even free.
I did receive your ear for the music of the spoken word ...
But in a minor key.

Other loves came down in tact, the ones that brought you calm
Your scratchy 78s of Beethoven and Franck
Are my CDs of Bach, Satie and Brahms

But better far than any thing of yours you hopefully passed on
Was how you'd note when my gaze inclined to where you'd never gone
And say or hint the world was mine and my own stars were there to follow