The wistfulest thing about my father's passing is also the wistfulest thing about his art: no one but us, his family, know its greatness.

My dad, Ray O'Hara, was a wordsmith all his life, but wrote most of his poetry in the sixties. He and some college friends put out a poetry rag called The Golliard, which never amounted to much, as poetry endeavors mostly don't. Afterwards, he collected a sheaf of his own poems, typed up on onion skin paper on an old Royal typewriter, bound in a red chad folder. Across the front, with the ink of one of those plain white Bic pens he always kept in his shirt pocket, he wrote its title: POULTRY. He told me he sent the collection off to several publishing houses, but even then, poetry wasn't an easy sell, and editors weren't an easy bunch to please, and so the collection was never published.

At some point in between the crafting of these poems and the birth of my older sister, Dad's writing practice waned. He switched from using up typewriter ribbons to selling them. But he never stopped viewing the world through a poet's eye or appraising it with a poet's tongue.

I grew up in the heady atmosphere of high altitude language. Other kids played football or catch with their dads; I practiced wordplay with mine. Words were tools and words were treasures. Words were meant to be combined and contorted, and if you bent them just so, you could make them mean things they weren't meant to mean--and what a scalp-shivering rush you would experience when it was your own brain that hammered out such a construction.

Dad died yesterday morning after a six-month long battle with cancer's minions, the secondary infections. Or, as in the words of another great poet, A.E. Housman, "to the wind's twelve quarters," he took his "endless way." I hugged his empty body, and kissed his recently vacated head, and then the mortuary people came to collect him, and I shortly found myself sitting on the floor with POULTRY, tearfully remembering my dad, and marveling at the arrangements of words that once flowed out of his head and heart.

As the only surviving family wordsmith, I'm tasked with composing the obituary. What can I say? What paragraph can encapsulate this man? He was loved, as all good fathers and husbands are; he hailed from Florida, hated the humidity, and escaped "as soon as he could"; he endured an uninspiring career in office supply sales in order to put food on the table while the typewriter paper starved for lack of verse. He enjoyed being in the woods and keeping Bic pens in his shirt pocket; he is survived by his wife, two daughters, a granddaughter, and a world that does not know how it suffers for not having read his words.

I will now attempt to remedy that last, if only in a small way, by publishing, posthumously, some of Ray O'Hara's POULTRY. Please enjoy this tiny piece of my father's legacy.

Credo

Poetry
comes tortured and
needing, resolves
itself and goes
leaving foolscap
discolored with echoes
of caring.
...It is not justified.

Life
comes cockeyed hopeful,
devours sporadically
itself, at best,
and leaves only shards
and sorrows that mutate
before they perish.
...It cannot be justified.

Love
comes livid and desperate,
causing the pangs of
itself, and goes
attaining none of its ends,
but creating
poetry and life
...and is thus justified.

The Plethora Machine

There is fire in the scrub-oak,
searing a howled sky, and I
burn the thickets of English
to find the ravening verbs
and tigerish phrases I need.
But only simpering words are left,
not worthy to go with you
into the still, whimpering ash.

Facade

The house across
the street has a sly way
of garnering light
about its arches
as if someone
loved there.

Materiel

The harsh palmetto,
dark and bright in the sun,
has fronds that would comb the brain.

Its seething clumps seem
impolite and obscene
to
man
with
his
love

of
ranks
and
of
rows.

But the berries make good wine
and the fans make good mats
and the shade makes good
rattlesnakes.

Remember Daddy

His voice, the timbre
of him escapes me.

He can't have been tall,
I guess. It's funny

That remembering him
hurts so much less

Than these strangler's thumbs
of forgetfulness.

Carnival

The sign says sno-
cones over thirty
delicious flavors.

She wants this
too and I
grope wallet-ward

thinking how cold
are bought things.

Absence

She has gone, and I retain
just the savor of her name
in these vacant afternoons.
Be silent, savage mind,
that I may gain a time
to quietly adopt my wounds.

Man in a Long Box

This overly-furnished parlor, then, is your patriarchal
waystation. Your dead peers are peering at us
from the walls.

The pastor has expressed his belief, in verse,
recited twice, that your frequent weekends
out of church involved some cool, dappled-faun
love of the woods. How can a man know how
to pray for you, Grandfather, if he knows nothing
of the hot trails, the panting dogs, the hot kill?

There are several shocking things:
Glass and bright metal rest you, who were more
at ease with wood and leather. Your hands
aren't clever, anymore, on this expanse of best suit.
Death. Is death, then, feminine? We must think so,
our people, or we would not have let them rouge
your face.

Your hair, at least, is right. The practiced part.
The barber, still barbered perfectly.

We would like to leave this place, Grandfather,
but your wife, mother and grandmother to us all,
will not depart her bitter watch.
We talk of the fine weather, the massed flowers.
But she will only stay, and cry, and say,
"That's my flower in there," and "That's
my flower in there."

The Cute Way They Kicked Us Out

I recall the tall islands of Puget Sound
and the way the ground-birds ran
screaming narrowly by the surf
when sea-mist settled in the trees.

The funny thing is that I have eaten
bagels in Tijuana and spaghetti
in the villages of Okinawa,
but my friend from Calcutta
can't buy hamburgers in Florida.

The ground birds howl here, too,
obscuring the fact that home
is a myth of my people.

---

I love you, Steemit!

@lesliestarrohara