The Diagrammer of Sentences
for
my father
Beneath the kitchen’s halo of fluorescence
I stood shyly at your side,
The pen in your big freckled fist
Filleting sentence after sentence,
Whether compound or not,
With all manner of tenses shivering,
And the phrase singled out, and the absolute exposed.
Music from the stove a few feet away,
My mother humming, pot lids clanking,
Above and below and around, cries and laughter—
Ten of us crammed into that bungalow
Braced against the winter riding in
From the frost-shorn fields.
Find the subject,
You
said to me, That’s the proper start—
Subject
or object, which was I?
And then the predicate, with its verb—
To
sing, to pray, to think, to be,
How
could words contain such festering?
“To modify,” you said, Is to
shape, to fix qualities to—
Word-love
infecting the air we breathed,
The
dictionary presiding at supper
Night
after night, a Prospero’s book
Of
roots and derivations,
And
scraps of paper fluttering on the walls,
Poems,
proscriptions, prayers,
Some
in foreign tongues:
In
medio stat virtue.
In
bocca chiusa,
Non
ci entra mosche.
Character
is all.
Wind banged the house-side
As you looked sideways up, your eyes
Behind your thick black glasses
Studying my face.
Want to try? you asked, then turned back
To the blank white universe
Your hand held in place, printing a sentence there
With a flourish.
Did I take the pen,
Scatter your words on my own diagram’s broken,
Sideways tree?
I remember the sentence
You made for me:
Gladly the man and his daughter walked up the hill.
.