SUBJECT>Re: Notes My Father Left in Arkansas, 1975 POSTER>Laurel EMAIL> DATE>1110471188 EMAILNOTICES>no IP_ADDRESS>dhcp024-166-083-002.neo.rr.com PASSWORD>aaFRbor6/KzWk PREVIOUS>84421 NEXT> IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

Made some changes. See what you think:

Notes My Father Left in Arkansas, 1975

What I know of my father:
his finger rubbing the edge of his ear,
feeling the hair that grew there.

He'd stare at the landscape
like a man back from sea,
wipe his hands over his face,
open his eyes and find his life begun anew
as a field hand where no one cared

if he remained silent for weeks.
Once, he took his car beyond the lights
of town, drove through the drive-in
theatre, uprooting the cables that fed

the actors’ voices into cars.
He couldn't name the devil
he conjured that night,
a devil he wished would come back
and take him from the ruins.

Looks like you've got the seed of a good poem here. I like the disconnection---and damn, I changed that verb, didn't I---of the voices from the cars. Serves as a nice metaphor for the disconnection between parent and child, the silence between them.

Written more than a few father poems myself. Never could quite touch that man nor his silence with words.

I probably cut too much. By now, you know what to do with my edits. (smile)

Laurel