Once again, I’m immensely grateful to the excellent team at The Good Men Project for publishing this poem. (Stay tuned for more in a series on the theme of toxic masculinity.)
My Father’s Silence
Back in different days not fondly recalled
his silences could choke our entire house,
like a snake sucking the last slow breath from
whatever it was instinct or appetite attracted.
Do these reptiles learn from their parents—
imitating ways to prey? Invisible until prepared
to strike, centuries of stalking and waiting
a shared behavior: aggressively passive survival.
With no alternatives theirs was old-fashioned
silence: closed doors, separate beds, different
dreams. If eclipses are best defined as absence
of light, a bad marriage is a sky of expired stars.
Black holes are magnets, attracting everything
like an irresistible dance that becomes nothing.
Are ignored entreaties lost in emotional voids,
or do they glow in bleak places, a kind of hope?
Would every rebuffed advance steel his heart—
hardening each second? Or did it more accurately
steal a little more life away from him as he waited,
luxuriating in a stew of disconnection and defiance?
Each time my mother tried, saying whatever
she could to talk him down (to get him to talk),
she proved the ways wives are the ones obliged
to stand down, forgoing pride for the family’s sake.
Then and now such women endure in darkness—
staunch and retaining stores of love and resolution;
a stoicism familiar to those colder-blooded creatures
that abide and draw vitality from the syzygy of silence.
