Downhill Toward a Hairpin Curve

October 16, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Paul drove his dad to the hazardous waste dump.
His dad radiated a cobalt blue glow.

This glow was his nature shining through his death
as the body initiated decomposition.

He was a mean old cuss who was not afraid
to shoot your dog to make a point.

Paul feared the incineration of cremation
would release toxic particulate into the air.

He wanted professionals who would neutralize
the acid tongue that spoke from a heart of darkness.

He was sure he would have to junk his car
once this ride was over.

Nothing would get that blue glow
out of the upholstery.

The Geiger counter he carried on walks
through the desert near Los Alamos clicked regularly.

Memorial Day

July 7, 2022July 7, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Thirty years to the day
after we spread dad’s ashes
in the cornfields of his youth

he stands in front of me
even after I pinch myself
to be sure I am not dreaming.

He is the younger version of himself
that I never met
being born twenty years into his marriage.

His lips move but no sound.
I ask him to repeat himself.
His lips move but no sound again.

I ask if he can bring Albuquerque rain.
He shakes his head.
I hear the mechanism click

that turns the water on
to the drip system in the garden
for butterfly bushes and bee balm.

He shakes his head.
He laughs soundlessly
and passes through the kitchen sink

to the outdoor barbecue
on Memorial Day.
I do not think chemists

who made World War II bombs
bigger and more explosive
are commemorated on this day.

In the Chicagoland house of my youth
we never had a barbecue
so why would he start now?

Movie

May 11, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

In the movie about that dad
who pushes his kids too hard.
He pushes those people
who exploit his kids’s
status as phenoms
just as hard.

I will leave it to you to guess
if the movies shows the kids
playing on grass
playing on a chalk marked field
playing on concrete.

I will leave it to you to guess
if it is a father-son movie
or a father-daughter movie
or if the featured kid
is gay, straight or trans.

I will leave it to you to guess
what type and shape of ball
the kids were phenomenal at playing.
Or if their genius set game pieces
on a checkered board.

I will tell you that no animals
were injured in the making
of this movie.

Father

April 27, 2022 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ 2 Comments

I understand now.
I am slow. It took me some time.
Only the living change clothes
and addresses.

Oh! That explains why burial crypts
have many drawers—
none filled with shirts
or undergarments.

Last week I looked at your headstone
and wondered why
with all our technology
the stone is not shaped like your head.

I placed a Brooks Brothers catalogue
in your grave before the dirt covered you.

postscript

This poem is about a father—not my father.

Twenty-Nine Years On

September 8, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

My father died
on the third of August
nineteen ninety-two
in an auto accident
when he mistook
a two-way stop
for a four-way stop
after surviving
the nineteen-eighteen influenza
the great depression
World War Two
the Korean War
the death of his son
and a heart attack.

At his funeral
and after we spread
his ashes
over the cornfields
he farmed
as a young man
his voice kept appearing
in my ears
with mixed messages
about how I handled
the death of my daughter
and other aspects
of being a man.

If his voice showed up
in my dreams
I could have
written off the experience
as the chaotic language
dreams use for the dead
to communicate with the living
even if their fist pounds
into their open palm
and shouts
I should embrace
the church and work
not therapy
to quiet my pounding heart.

That Is Enough

July 13, 2021 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

Three decades have passed
since we eulogized my father
in the First Congregational Church.

The largest test of manhood I ever took
was to gracefully appreciate
all the good things others related to me

while I was silently relieved
he was gone from human form
and unmet father-son relations.

I grew up alright without ever
going hunting, fishing
or to a ball game with my father.

It was a less muscular manhood
I learned reading books
and bicycling long distances.

His version of Cowboy-up was not going to the ER
the day basketball mangled my right ankle.
We waited two days for a regular doctor appointment

as the breaks and ligament tears
painfully protested the lack of attention
by turning colors and swelling to great size.

I guess that did obliquely prepare me
for the rigors of adulthood
since hope and success are both painful.

I learned on my own to be the author
of definitions of the terms
and to judge my effort’s results.

Miles & Years Away

November 16, 2020 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

In my mind’s night
memory fields blossom
with an abstract
of what I have lived.

How can I feel
you chew your tobacco
when you are buried
in your threadbare jeans?

Or that happy hour
when that first burn slick
of Kentucky bourbon
scarred my throat.

If I add a shot before sleep
my memory fields bloom
with father’s work
when he was a teen

clearing by hand
all the weeds from between
long green rows
of waist-high maize

with his farmer’s tan
contrasting against
his sweat soaked white t-shirt
crossed by brown suspenders.

Disrobing

November 12, 2020 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ Leave a comment

I thought I was home.
I was in the arctic.

I climbed out of my father
and left his body upon the ice.

The relative temperature felt the same
against bare skin.

I mean I left behind his behaviors I learned
through childhood observation.

I mean I never want my hand
to make a fist to teach a lesson.

Not even to punch a hole
through the darkness in search of light.

Father On His Son’s Birthday

October 10, 2020October 10, 2020 ~ Kenneth P. Gurney ~ 2 Comments

Alone, on the old Manassas Battlefield,
I wait for you, for what you might be,
what I might become. I sit
on the thick grass near the Robinson House
and listen to the voices of birds,
the voices of the old bronze monuments,
the voices on the wind as it moves through the branches.

If you have grown into yourself, as I hope,
how will I recognize your voice,
the different tread of your footsteps,
the recent histories you speak?

Lonely, I walk down to the stone bridge—
Bull Run flows as it has for years uncounted—
to the new road that layers itself
upon the old road that once carried limbers
and their combative cannon.

Lonely, I trust that our battles ended,
that a reconstruction of our friendship
returns like the song birds
to find the berries ripe upon the branches,
like the farmers who till the fields
as all their forefathers before them.

If you have grown into yourself, as I hope,
you do not need me anymore,
do not require my advice or guidance.
Boldly, you make your own history.

Alone, on the old Manassas Battlefield,
I walk the slight path past the farm ford
and up the flanks of Matthews Hill
where Evans once stood up to Burnside,
where you, my son, first stood up to me.

postscript

I ran out of new work that I felt good enough to post, since I had a tough writing week where creativity was scarce. This poem is from my book Fluid Shape Of An Empty Womb. It is one of my all time favorites of my own poems.