Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
Unlearning Dad, poems by David Graham.
Unlearning Dad
By the week and month, he unlearns a good lifetime.
He’s lost his math, and scans the same page four times
without effect. He unlearns names and places quickly,
stands puzzled at elevator buttons and lamp switches.
Does the shrinking circle of his life feel like flame
closing in, or has he unlearned that future also?
I’m scared, was all he would say, back when
he would speak of it at all, but who can guess
what that means to a man who takes an hour to shave
and sometimes lathers up with toothpaste?
At the doctor’s steady, calm diagnosis,
that sounds pretty grim was his entire response.
Mostly docile now, baby awakening from a nap,
he’s unlearned a good part of what we call his old self,
that atom no one ever imagines splitting.
He’s even unlearned the living and the dead, giving
commands to his vanished dog, hearing his brother’s voice
echoing down the hall thirty years after the heart attack.
Then looks at me with the same fretful,
pleading face I know I must have turned on him
the first time he knew he couldn’t help me.
How It Seems
For my father it must seem the whole world
accelerates away. He stands on the shoulder
blinking in the glare and dust, half-deafened
by the tumult of big rigs clattering past,
swaying in the whoosh and blare of it.
Whole conversations rocket out of sight
like camper vans aboil with kids.
License plates flash in the sun, blinding
as fragments of old anecdote.
Only occasionally does some trooper
pull up to ask him if everything’s OK.
He always says fine, yes, he’s fine,
and it’s not just politeness, I think,
and it’s not just a lie or confusion.
He’s fine so long as he doesn’t try
to edge out again into streaming traffic,
the one thing he most wants to do.
On My Father’s Eighty-Third Birthday
Five years of steady decline,
nurses to spoon his yogurt
and the humiliation
of fluorescent light shining
over his bewilderment.
His hands twist uselessly
around washcloths, eyes
mainly closed now,
so little music left
in this life. Just the sound
of Mom reading him a letter,
starting a novel, the paper,
a book of knock-knocks.
She claims he smiles
at the punchlines,
but I think he grins at her voice—
sixty years the breath
at his side, his gossip,
his truth, his wife.
Who wouldn’t laugh a little
at the luck of that
© David Graham
Most recent of David Graham’s poetry collections is The Honey of Earth (Terrapin Books). Others include Stutter Monk and Second Wind. He also co-edited Local News: Poetry About Small Towns (with Tom Montag) and After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (with Kate Sontag). Individual poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies as well as online. He lives in Glens Falls in New York, on the edge of the Adirondack Park.