 The
Smell of Tweed and Tobacco
My old man, that's what
we called our fathers then
As in my old man
can lick your old man
and here I am remembering
at an age where I myself
could be accurately named
in those same terms
Well of course
we loved each other
It goes without saying
and so I've said it
and it rings true
Rolls from the tongue
because that's
the way it was with us
I kissed him on the lips
from earliest memory
Unselfconsciously
until the day he died
No turned cheeks for us
I remember brilliantly
his arms around me
Smells of tweed and tobacco
Locked in that embrace
the same for love or combat
Only minor variance in the hold
but who could know
at such a tender age
the warfare of generations
The minefields in backyards
playing with loaded guns
Those darker sides of growing up
with unexplained sharp edges
But it's darkness that shapes the man
and gives dimension
to what otherwise would be
too innocent a memory
Flat and plain and way too smooth
to honestly recall
Each friend, each enemy and love
knew just a piece of him
Myself as well and I saw him
largely through a youthful prism
The colors of his character
depending on the light and angle
An intensity that blinded me
and made him many men, all heros
There was a time, when I was just fifteen
and finally asked my dad
about a thin blue line that ran
from mid arm to shoulder
Not a scar, but something
near to that, just below the skin
He said when he was about my age
he had a secret motorcycle
An Indian, his parents didn't know about
He layed her down on cinders
limping home, he cleaned torn flesh
as best he could with a toothbrush
He wore long sleeves that summer
they never knew or so he thought
That story changed our whole relationship
I saw him differently
Knew that once this man had been
a boy, a kid a lot like me
who held back dreams and
sometimes tricked the edge of truth
Worked around his own father
sometimes winning, sometimes not
A momentary clarity between us
when we were briefly man and man
And yet he closed all my young dreams
to substitute his own
Took away that youthful indecision
and carved it to another shape
One that I lived with and lied with
and struggled with as though
I could slip inside his arm
with all those cinders and make him proud
Just another secret hidden away
and toothbrushed from the truth
Hugs and tweed tobacco smell
bore me up and tore me down
To see myself as him and try
to live a life that's his not mine
Years of that, decades now
and sometimes I still see more of him
than any son should see of that craft
that intensity we call a life
In recurring dreams I fly a plane
that cannot clear the trees, full power
pull back the stick, they loom and loom
then brush the wheels and clear
Ten years since I've had it now
but it's out there somewhere looming still
The batter of a wall, that mason's term
for the sloping back that gives it strength
Larger at the top it falls, there's pain
but strength and insight in compression
As if that weren't hard enough to learn
it can't be taught, just done or not
Knowing what to keep and what to throw away
from that broad base he gave
My middle years of struggle made a wider top
brought me to deconstruction
Rubbled heaps, the bricks of wealth
mortar of mortgage, dust of broken promises
A constant hosing down to see what belongs
what must be hauled away
Not to judge his wall or anyone's
just look at mine and see it's battered back
He died as well as he could, better than some
and not nearly well enough to suit him
The tortured wasting away of cancer
that darkened his eyes with fear
teaching me even in that, there was a better way
than he had found to do it
Finally he flickered and was gone
like a guttered out candle and that was that
What lasts, what's there left of him for me
gone now nearly thirty years
What lasts of lessons and life, of obligation
and searching, what lasts of prismed colors
Love lasts, or at least remembrances of it
Shadings of the prism, fine blue lines
on arms that slipped around me and gave a damn
The smell of tweed and tobacco
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