After Hernia Repair
Sixty years ago, I stood at our doorstep to watch my father open the car door, stand, and take his slow, careful steps across the yard, my mother walking slowly alongside to match his pace. Still, he seemed undiminished in size or strength, his mythic aura intact,
though I noticed a blotchy, loose quality in the skin. His face was tired and his voice creaky and strangely reserved.
I wanted things to be the same between us, wrestling and rough house on the living room floor, to feel his bristly stubble against my child’s smooth skin, to smell that leathery odor of sweat, cigars, after-shave, as before.
As a gesture only, to rekindle the spirit of our play, I raised the garden hose in his path, as if to trip him, a child’s bad joke on the once-invulnerable. My mother grabbed me, locking my troublesome limbs in her furious embrace, her tight syllables alight with fierce, protective love, telling the terms of my banishment.
Now, I take my own slow, careful steps, conscious of that same flaw in my male anatomy, the gaps that have opened in the membrane that holds my guts in place. It’s a reminder of something: that, despite appearances, none of us is built to last forever, that even our children, and our children’s children must know our weakness.
Taking No Leave
These particular trees — white birches — I remember from childhood,
rare and therefore notable in the lower Hudson valley,
They have papery white bark that peeled off in tiny scrolls,
Which could be used to start a campfire and summon the local Indian spirits,
who, though annihilated centuries ago,
I hoped might nevertheless bless our camping trips.
But I left the Hudson valley and these northern trees years ago.
I didn’t mourn the loss of place or take my leave at the time.
My pressing business was to start the new life quickly
and escape the hold of the old one.
In the same way, my wife and I now hurry on,
abandon the eastern trees, the familiar gentle roll of the land —
the signposts and scenery of our lives for over 30 years —
to embrace a new life on the other side of the continent.
“Never love something that can’t love you back,” someone told me.
He was an entrepreneur, less sentimental,
a man who hired and fired. But, what if these places
we abandon have loved us? Surely, they have nurtured us in their passive way.
Despite my doubts, I heed my friend’s advice and move on,
taking no leave of the Eastern Coastal Plain or its advancing fall colors.
ii.
The friends we leave behind are different.
They loved us back actively, with a vigor that was animal,
not vegetable, and still do.
We held parties, wrote letters, arranged visits,
avoiding any talk that would have tended toward “Goodbye,”
issuing invitations to our future home on the West Coast,
pretending that all our knowing and loving of each other would go on as before.
To do otherwise would have rubbed us raw,
stripped the decent reserve from us like bark.
We needed to give ourselves and our friends the freedom to go on,
to decide for themselves what to honor or neglect.
Each of them chose their form of leave-taking.
Some, saying nothing–no matter.
We love them still, more for our own sake than theirs.
We yield up the space we once occupied back to them,
space to construct a new version of their lives,
in the time left to them.
Clark Bouwman is an essayist, poet, and translator living in Richmond, California. His work has appeared in Gargoyle Online, The Dreaming Machine, The Antonym, Minimus, The Takoma Voice, and in the anthology Music Gigs Gone Wrong. Originally from the DC area, he and his wife moved to the bay area in 2018 to help with their grandchildren.