Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
Of Fathers and Sons, poems by Richard W. Halperin.
A Personal Poem
During a period of recurrent unemployment,
and with a young son to support, my mother
would stand on Fifth Avenue near Fifty-first Street
in front of a big Art Deco statue of Atlas
carrying the world on his shoulders. ‘That’s how
I feel,’ she would say. In this, she was not
an Irish woman or an American woman,
she was a desperate woman. She was pretty,
which sometimes helped and sometimes didn’t.
One plus one is not two, it is one plus one.
A desperate woman is not a desperate man.
A statue is not a man, it is a statue. A son
is not a helper, although sometimes he is,
he is a job. He is a burden, hers, in a society
set up for those who can keep going.
A desperate society. Looking at the statue
helped her arrange her head before going home
to talk to a child. It helped, because she
related to art. Art offered her solidarity.
For my father, too, who was a desperate man.
Brahms symphonies helped him arrange
his head before telephoning – once a week
from a thousand miles away – his son who,
he knew, would tell him, too enthusiastically,
that things were fine. Does fibbing make worlds
roll off shoulders? It does, for a few seconds.
Is it as good art in that regard? I am an artist.
The answer is: yes.
Of Fathers and Sons
Watching shadows move.
Giving each other a wave.
Fathers and sons.
The best book – Turgenev’s –
has been written.
This poem is Of.
Prepositions are rather new.
Many languages don’t have them.
The wallpaper of the guesthouse
where I am staying is white roses
on a black background.
Black roses on a white background
would be the same.
Beauty is beauty.
My father is my father.
I am his son,
I write poems.
He played golf.
That’s all.
My Spenser Teacher
for Sears R. Jayne
He died many years ago
but there he was last night
in a dream. Not he, but,
let’s say, his personality.
A vibration. A rainbow.
When he read Spenser to us,
his calm voice, amusement
somewhere in it, made each line
shocking, and of course in Spenser
each line is shocking. He knew
you can’t teach Spenser, you
present him. Niagara Falls.
That impossible jewelled fragment.
Newspapers describe every horror
without touching the why, the waste,
the hate, the illusions, the stubborn
hope. The sheer glamour of being alive.
Spenser is straight reportage.
The Other Side of the Valley
She was on the other side of the valley.
Or – depending on the dream –
on the other side of the chasm.
And yet there was no distance.
In the tonality of experience, there was
no distance. The phrase comes from
Henry James. That middle-aged man
who was so concerned about having
put on weight, has something to tell us.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert (eighteen shorter collections since 2014). In autumn 2024, Salmon will bring out a Selected & New Volume, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon most of these. The seventeenth and eighteenth Lapwing, The Painted Word and Three Red Hats, appeared in July 2024.