—Gerald A. Fanning (5/19/29-4/22/2013) Make it quick, my brother said, pressing his phone to your cold ear. A priest was waiting beyond the curtain. One hundred miles away, I stammered Dad, I'm not sure if you can hear me. I love you. After hanging up, I walked out of my office into the light of early spring, crossed the parking lot, opened the heavy door of the church I never visit. I do love the hush of empty sanctuaries, the chatter and engines of the day made mute, the votive flicker, the floor stained with rainbow, the air a hint of incense and lingering prayer. Kneeling in the first pew, I stared up at a wooden Christ, at some gilded Latin phrase over the crucifix that meant nothing to me. One you no doubt knew well. Father, let me call you that now that you're gone. Here we are still, on opposite shores, another sea of indecipherable language between us. Listen, father statue, father stone, the test is over and we failed. But maybe now we can trace the letters, sound out the words in separate tongues, translate distance into love. Teach it to me in your new dialect. I need to learn what this means. I need to know this by heart.
—for Gabriel As you speak, new worlds rise in your eyes. A voice within your voice—do you hear it, too?— could fill a whole sea with whale song. It sings fathom and league, sings launch and conquer. It is ocean wide now, this good force of your going. Yet still, my heart fumbles to fasten some small rope around the dock—and so love is—wishes for a way to keep us here. Too late. That little boat you were, giggling in the tub as I blew bubbles, is oceans away. Sailboat, tugboat, yacht, steamer, freighter, I've been watching from the dock and hear already the growing ache and groan of giant chains clanking an iron hull, the long horn of adulthood calling you with its sweeping wall of mist and fog. When you look back and see me wave, may I be the ocean's shoulders ever rolling beneath you. Please—know me not as a country fading from view, but as one who carried with love the great world you now carry in you.
—Craters of the Moon National Monument The first steep ascent, you and I reach the rim, a vista of black lava flow on one side of us, a plunging, dormant crater on the other. It sounds like glass, you say, nudging a porous cinder nugget with your foot. Like two lone astronauts, we stand in deep silence for a moment, staring off into miles and millennia of a broken, breakable earth. We hike over ridges, down into craters, leap small ravines of fractured magma, cinder’s silty crunch under our soles. I enter an ancient cavemouth, look inside. Somewhere in there, millions of bats hang—secrets the dusk will later open. As we walk, I fly back through my life, sharing stories, stopping when I worry I’m boring you. To my surprise, you say, gently: No, keep going, I’m really interested. How does anything grow here? In seeming desolation life somehow thrives; everywhere tufts of spiky pale flowers—thistle, aster and sagebrush dot the charred hills. Beneath us, dusty sandstone shifts from ash to rust. Only yesterday I’d said on journeys like this we leave old selves behind. Yet, on ground scorched into rock and ruin, it’s tempting to see annihilation as event, the making made, the being fixed, the eruption history, the flow forever petrified. At the end of the trail, we sit and you ask: now can I share part of my life story with you? When a heart far wider than mine opens: rift of blinding beauty, river of fire and blood, of what was solid: fluid again. And I become no longer your father, and you no longer my son.
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet, and The Seed Thieves, as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music, and Old Bright Wheel. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Atlanta Review, Waxwing, THRUSH, The Cortland Review, The Common, and many other journals. He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, as well as the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI, and the Founder/Director of PEN/INSULA POETRY, a resource for Michigan poets.
Turn-of-the-century hypnotism posters. There is not much information available about these images, only that they were the product of The Donaldson Lithographing Co. based in Newport, Kentucky and seem to be from around 1900. From Public Domain Review.
