"My father sometimes said that if he hadn't become an English professor, he would like to have been an astronomer."

from
A Bequest to My Daughter

Yes, I can draw you back,
write you exhausted fables, show you far wasted countries, spent years, the ashen light
that flickers in whatever eloquence they evoke. Still, I don't lie. Every failure sifts some honest grief or joke into view, makes me real, lets me speak. I prayed with great poets for beauty, courtesy for you, helped you invent your childhood, the barn in a shoebox, your white terrier, the enormous starfish. Now you have grown, gone out into our century, violence, fanatical beyond murder, beneath words, pride that kills God. I cannot know what door you have closed, what wreck is burning behind you. I speak half-dumbly here, a clown diminishing, giving you legends, a collection of loving words, the lucky courage of poetry. Yes, those at least I can offer, red
And black emblems, my own fearless Room in the desert,
a loyal column
of smoke on the horizon.

—Don Baker

Magazine
Winter/Spring 2000

Three Ways
of Looking at My Father


by Alison Baker

When I was in Miss Mary Blake's fourth grade class at Hoover School in Crawfordsville, we put on a play for the PTA. The play's name, its author, and its plot are long forgotten, but it concerned a convention in which representatives from the planets of our solar system held a meeting somewhere in space.

The night of the show, each arriving parent—mine among them—received a construction-paper telescope through which to view the proceedings. I played the part of the Ambassador from Neptune, and each time I spoke I stepped out from behind a sea-blue cardboard planet which was carried by a fellow Neptunian. Who knows what we discussed? This would have been around the time of the early manned space flights, so perhaps we debated the appropriate punishment for trespassing on another planet's moon.

Whatever the subject, it must have come off well, for the next day the principal, Mr. Clyde Gentry —-a man who may have had his own acting aspirations, as he played Santa Claus every year in the Christmas parade—came to our room to congratulate us. He said he had kept his eye on the audience, and they had clearly enjoyed the play. "But only one parent watched the whole thing through the telescope," he said, and even before he looked in my direction, I knew whose parent it had been.

*

Beam us forward into the late sixties. Men had trespassed on the moon and returned unscathed, but here on our home planet we were less lucky. The distance between Crawfordsville and Vietnam was not enough to hide what was going on there, and the divisions between people, in town as well as on the Wabash campus, were deep and often ugly.

At some point my father and others began holding a weekly vigil at the flagpole in front of the library, and they kept it up for the duration of the war. Sometimes people spoke, occasionally they read poetry; but for the most part they just came and stood, reminding themselves and those who saw them that people were dying in Vietnam.

Struggling through adolescence at Crawfordsville High School, I was barely aware of the weekly vigil, but my mother could see the flagpole from our house. Now and then, she says, there was a crowd; sometimes there was a handful of students and faculty; but it was not unusual for my father to stand there alone for half an hour before coming home for lunch.

*

He had been a navigator for the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. According to his discharge papers, he "flew dangerous missions over enemy territory," delivering bombers from one place in the world to another. In the desk in our living room was a sandalwood box from India that was filled with coins he'd brought home from those foreign countries. I often studied them, trying to match them to the stories he told my sister and me. The ornate square and rippled annas from India: his first sight of Mount Everest, gleaming above the clouds. The sailing ship on a half penny, the weird squiggles on a dix milliemes piece: the night he flew from Algeria to land in England in a blizzard. The cornucopia on a franc from Afrique Occidentale Francais: people in West Africa had called him 'massa.'

My father sometimes said that if he hadn't become an English professor, he would have liked to have been an astronomer. I pictured him in a Plexiglas bubble-not hunkering underneath, like Randall Jarrell's ball turret gunner, but on top of the plane, gazing up at the sky, fixing the plane's position with a sextant, measuring the distances to the stars. I knew there were other men in the plane, but they were only shadowy, substanceless ghosts.

My sister and I were glad he hadn't actually killed anyone. Later, when I was old enough to read his poetry, I understood that those were not the words he would have used.

*

Werner Heisenberg was talking about the study of atomic particles when he suggested that the act of observing a phenomenon can alter it, but he could have said something similar about poetry. The act of describing the world may change it. Hold a vigil once a week, and see if a war ends. Describe the lives of men in exact and resonant words, and see what poems form. Watch a daughter through a paper scope as she begins her journey toward the stars. See what happens.

See if you can tell the dancer from the dance.

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