Thoughts of the Father by Philip Salom

Thoughts of the Father Ku / Work on What Has Been Spoiled
… Setting right what has been spoiled by the father. Danger. No blame rests upon 
 the departed father. He receives in his thoughts the deceased father. 

It hurts when you know thoughts of the father are in the son
 like a repertoire of non-events.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son, the sons
of broken marriages, my own.

Not 'spoilt', something lost, indefinably, gone missing
when he was spoil between them.

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother
in place of the first? 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow
postures, the strange mime

which adolescents make when practising annulment.
And keeping for themselves

enough to make of the self some stern amazement.
Sons are everywhere spoiling

their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. Hormones hit
like a room of conscientious

kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced
to monogrunts and every ing 

now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps
language taken on the forearms.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves,
know I love him, know he knows it,

but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To
whom would I pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s
nine-tenths water, to my son,

in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him, the bones
of my father lie satisfied and said

as thoughts in the son, a setting right after the break
like breath free now of the words

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing,
his breath a repertoire of oar strokes

between the banks of birth and death. Echoes on the surface.
When thoughts of the son are in the father.

Posted with permission, also on Stillcraic.
Editor: Jennifer Compton

We had a Melbourne launch for Notes for the Translators, a collection of 142 Australian and NZ poets of which Philip Salom was one.  And I was very taken indeed by Philip Salom's reading of this poem. By some strange oversight, some infinitely mischievous work of the printer's devil, his notes to possible translators had been left out of the book. So the intended notes appeared on my blog post last week and appear again here.

Philip is an Australian poet and novelist who began publishing in 1980. In 2003 Philip Salom was recognised with the Christopher Brennan Award - a prize given for lifetime achievement in poetry, recognising a poet who produces work "of sustained quality and distinction". There is more on Philip on his website. And to invest in a copy of the fascinating book – Notes for the Translators – please email KitKelen@gmail.com

Notes by Philip Salom

In the mid 90s I wrote a sequence of poems prompted by the Commentaries of the I Ching. In this case (Thoughts of the Father), I wrote in response to Ku, the 18th hexagram. Above the poem, as epigraph, I have quoted those selections from the commentary that struck me most closely — in this case having an uncanny relevance to the estrangement from my son in the years following my divorce from his mother.

I felt distress and guilt over my son’s changed behaviour and personality, and I could not explain how unlike himself he had become. My son had been loving and extroverted as a child and now he was withdrawn, monosyllabic and sometimes angry; but the divorce coincided with his adolescence, and therefore it was difficult to know whether it was the separation or adolescence itself that had changed his personality. He was uneasy living with me and then with my new partner and eventually moved back with his mother (even though it was she who had initiated the divorce).

Still, I felt it was my ‘fault’, that the trauma had ‘spoiled’ him in some way – spoiled as in damage to his psychological state. Then I began to realise that he was far more like my father; they had more in common than I had with either. My father was modest, reserved, even withdrawn, and though he was rarely angry, he was markedly uneasy with his or other peoples’ emotions.

Themes

The above
themes run through the poem as the main continuity of behaviour, feeling, estrangement and sense of ‘spoiling’. This puns on spoils as in spoils of war, ironic in this case, as the spoils may themselves be broken, damaged. Another pun on spoil as in spoiling for a fight, expressing wildly, etc.

The nullity, annulment, non-events in feelings, communications, bonds, the sense of things gone, lost, missing, or kept back rather than shown or expressed. The Yin? And if so, then spoiling for a fight is the Yang. Ironic couple.

Adolescence, anger, change (this is the I Ching, after all!), uncertainty. The martial element: fighting feelings, restrained or controlled violence, kicking out at, fighting back, Kung Fu which the boy was learning, also related to Chinese culture. Repertoire as in learned acts, and behaviours, but also actions, fighting or resisting or defending. Blocks. And later in the poem, the un sounds come as the cruder phonetic/aural/vocalised version of ing verb endings, so fighting would become fightun and how these sounds are like grunts or fighting noises, or blocks (of both emotional and kung fu kind).

The ‘River’, rowing across, Charon, the boatman, the Styx or the waters leading to an afterlife, or the waters between birth and death, parallels here in the metaphor of the body (which is mainly water literally, and the wide water of parentage) and the genes of the deceased father (my father) crossing my body to be expressed (which is ironic, too, as a less expressive form) in the body of a son (not my body but my son’s ie the grandson). And the circular sense of the form in the poem which seems to ends as it began except with the reversal of knowledge (gained?) in the phrase — thoughts of the son are in the father.

This distancing device of the poem and the I Ching makes the poem poised above the personal and the impersonal, which is what I wanted from the poem and is in keeping with my ongoing critique of the too-easy lyric poem. Two line stanzas could signify: the father and son form, the shorelines of before and after, life and death. The mime of action without words, behaviour without response.

Line Notes

It hurts when you know: here the poem (firstly) addresses the poet, but then also addresses the reader, to consider the observation that follows. 

thoughts of the father are in the son like a repertoire of non-events. The son thinks of the father, but in this is a paradox, the acquired acts, behaviours, skills of repertoire – are non-events, ie: seem empty, null, denied perhaps.

Thinking how the father spoiled the son... Refers to father and son of the I Ching epigraph and the formal, distanced sense of definite article and then the change through broken marriages as situation to finally the personal: my own. 

Spoil, spoiled as in my notes, plus missing referring to lost and departed, and the bond spoiled...but the son is not spoilt (as in indulged, over-rewarded, etc)

Demanding too much of him, bringing home a second mother in place of the first? After a broken marriage, the father brings home another partner, a 'second mother' who could be perceived as 'replacing' the first. 

Work I have done wrong? He moves in a film of slow postures, the strange mime which adolescents make when practising annulment. Here enters the father as lyric subject, and the son denies him by movements, like the above repertoire, but this time movement of adolescent-style (universal!)
indifference to a parent through body language.

And keeping for themselves/enough to make of the self some stern amazement./ Sons are everywhere spoiling/  their fathers’ art and craft! No blame. This keeping back allows the naive and surprised engagement with world and self, but gives nothing much back to others. Natural (many sons do this to fathers (ironic repeat of spoiling) and not blame-worthy (and this no-blame directs to son and to father).

Hormones hit/like a room of conscientious/  kick-boxers. The brute beauty of vocabulary reduced/ to monogrunts and every ing/ now sounded un like feints, and blocks, and side-steps /language taken on the forearms. Here the movements take the specific form of resistance and violence, of martial arts, (also note the echo of art and craft, but against...) which is a metaphor of what the son is deliberately doing and also learning (perhaps). And a fairly likely echo or association here of martial arts with Chinese culture. Turning ing endings of English words into un - the grunt, the out-breath of hitting, sounding uncouth, as he extends his resistance even to language.

Years later, I watch him from the airport as he leaves, know I love him, know he knows it, but finds it wrong in public, forcing off my arm. To whom would I pray? The major time-shift, the retrospection and assumption of an easing of the above tensions, denials, etc, but not the denial of love shown, still fended off but not fought off... It is now reserve about emotions, and even language. And note the rhetorical question following as an echo of Confucius: When you give offense to heaven, to whom can you pray?

It is my father who has rowed across my body’s nine-tenths water, to my son, in spoiling for the simple life, of his before him The sudden realisation that the reserve, simple rather than complex life, etc, of my son is very like that of my father, as if the DNA of my father has moved/rowed across my body (which is a body of water: biologically, symbolically, mythically - and metaphysically?) to my son.

of my father lie satisfied and said as thoughts in my son, a setting right after the break, like breath free now of the words, and this knowledge satisfies my father (who is deceased though the poem doesn't say this) and the grandson, a homecoming of tendencies, which make sense, perhaps set right the break (not of bones but bonds) and is breath now, more elemental than complicated words...

like a hull brought in over water, the river, the rowing, his breath a repertoire of oar strokes between the banks of birth and death And this is where the feeling, the knowledge, the breath is going, across the elemental water, and again a repertoire of behaviour, of being, in the gap or river of life between birth and death.

Echoes on the surface. When thoughts of the son are in the father. The echoes are all these insights and overlaps, and recurrences, and of course the repeats in the actual poem of lines and words, such as repertoire, spoil, art and craft, rowing, water... and here too is the final, major, reconciling reversal of the first line - thoughts of the father are in the son which now becomes thoughts of the son are in the father. Where, of course, they have been all the time!

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Jennifer Compton is Tuesday Poem editor this week. Born in Wellington and living in Melbourne, Jennifer publishes poems and play scripts and has just been announced the winner of Australia's distinguished Newcastle Poetry Prize. She has also won NZ's prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award with her manuscript 'This City', which was published by Otago University Press, and other numerous prizes and residencies including the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington.