Asterisks
Reading a book by a respected poet,
I come to a poem that I don’t understand.
It’s one of many, really, but as this one
is particularly famous, I surrender my pride
to the internet and conduct a quick search
from which I learn that the piece
is about the death of the author’s father.
More confused than ever, I return to the book,
wondering how I could miss something so essential.
It’s here somewhere in all these words,
this tangled rosary of stanzas linked by asterisks.
But I could never find Waldo in his red and white world,
the crown among the zigzags in Highlights’ hidden pictures—
and even now, I concede, I am not clever enough
to find the death of this man’s father in his poem.
As a boy, I was in special education,
pinched into tiny cinder-block rooms that stank
of citric cleanser and earwax.
We studied the mathematics of bananas
and apples, fought with prepositions,
tried our hands at haiku,
converting syllables into one
too many blackbirds, while in other rooms
students turned numbers into music and made
chemicals react in puffs of natural magic.
Monumental! blurbs one writer.
Resonating! raves another. Erudite! Unflinching!
I stare into the page the way one stares into a 3D poster,
waiting for an image to emerge,
but nowhere can I see a dead father.
Frustrated, I lay the volume aside
and begin tidying the room,
anxious to shake off this sense of inadequacy,
as I was once so eager to escape
the syndromes and impediments
and congenital hygienes of my classmates,
when I stared into the night sky
of a workbook—
the constellations, dots I couldn’t connect,
figures I couldn’t grasp,
which existed, I was told,
somewhere above me.
Martin Vest
Rattle, October 2020
