When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds

by Peter Markus
(Wayne State University, 2021) 

Reviewed by Erica Goss

Encounters with birds carry a potent significance for human beings. Whether a goose chased us, or we tamed a crow, or kept parakeets in a cage, birds enhance our lives in countless and unpredictable ways. Birds embody contradictory beliefs; often seen as portents of menace and calamity, they also symbolize transformation and rebirth. Whether common or exotic, we’ve woven birds into our human mythology.
 
Peter Markus explores these connections in his first book of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds. Each poem in this taut, highly focused collection revolves around the decline and death of his father. Largely filtered through Markus’s experiences with birds during the years before and after his father died, the book examines this period of emotional travail recursively, revisiting the territory of loss and grief from a number of closely viewed perspectives. 
 
Birds haunt Markus. They come to him in the voice of the priest who gives his father last rites, in the eerie calls of loons at night, and in that common and too frequent encounter, “the bird that flew into the window,” from “More Birds Than I Know What to Do With.” As he disposes of the bird’s body, the speaker reflects:
 
     [ … ] when I walked the bird 
     over to the garbage can and dropped it gently in,
     it made a sound. The final note
     in its song.
 
In spite of the bird’s apparent weightlessness, its body makes a sound when it drops, a sound it will never hear. This fact reverberates with the speaker, who observes “I was held by it— / like when you hit your hand once on a drum.” In these lines, Markus evokes the physical presence of loss, a theme he will return to throughout the book.
 
Over the course of a long illness, the father loses his ability to speak. Markus gives him voice in “Look at Those Birds”:
 
     Whatever words my father might speak
     now that he is dead are obvious ones: look
     at those birds, he tells me.
 
The poem ends, “Father. Father. Father. Bird. Bird. Bird.” With these one-word statements, each ending in a period, Markus releases his father. The repetition suggests that letting go is bird-shaped—as his father’s presence diminishes over time, the existence of birds brings an unexpected comfort.
 
Although birds are named in the book—crow, swan, duck, seagull—the poems don’t describe them in detail. That they remain mostly mysterious emphasizes the unavoidable fact that even though our imaginations bestow fantastic abilities and power upon birds, we know little of their daily lives. In “We Just Wanted to Get Him Home,” Markus describes an encounter with a Great Blue Heron:
 
     [ … ] maybe he is waiting for me to see him,
     though as soon as I get too near his wings
     unfold open as though pulled by a string from above [ … ]
     I stand and watch
     as he disappears.
 
The poem jumps to “the last time my father was in the hospital, / I told the doctor: We just want to get him home. / I did not have to end this sentence with / to die.” The departure of the bird, prompted by the speaker being physically too close, echoes the predicament we find ourselves in while watching a loved one decline and die: we’re with them, but still completely separate from their suffering.
 
In “I take a Walk with the Gods,” Markus writes,
 
     I take a walk with the gods down to the river
     to see if we might reach an agreement.
 
Those lines bring to mind one of the five stages of grief, specifically bargaining. In this case, however, the speaker doesn’t ask the gods to extend his father’s life: “I do not beg for one more day. / Those days are over.” The gods’ jaded attitudes, as they go through the motions of ferrying the dead, seem to echo the speaker’s understanding of the inescapable outcome of his father’s illness: “The gods have a job / to do. There is no pleasure in their actions.” The poem ends with a concession to the inevitable: “My father is a fish / who will swim away once we choose to release him.”
 
Several poems center on how grief observes its own unsettling schedule, doubling back and leaping forward, leaving the mourner stunned anew. In “What Was Never His to Begin With,” Markus describes keeping “a tiny silver urn / with his father’s ashes in it [ … ] / because / he isn’t yet ready to give / his father back.” At the end of the poem, the Great Blue Heron returns, auguring change that the speaker is only dimly aware of:
 
     its long yellow beak stabbing
     at the dark and muddy waters
     moving steady in between its legs.
 
Similarly, in the book’s title poem, “When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds,” the death of a friend’s father evokes awkwardness, an inability to comfort: “I had words to say back / but they’re never the right ones [ … ] / Maybe what’s best is to not say anything. / To let silence have its way with grief.” The poem ends with the reminder that no matter what, life goes on:
 
     And the stars will be there too, as they always are,
     as they always will be, when there’s nothing more to say.
 
Two poems, “For My Mother” and “What Did I Know about Work,” spotlight Markus’s mother’s role as primary caregiver for his father. In “For My Mother,” the father’s death is just one link in a long chain of coming tragedies:
 
     Now he’s dead. Now my mother sits alone in the quiet
     waiting to join him. I try to imagine what that must be like.
     But I can’t. I want to live. 
 
No matter how bad things were with his father, “nights / it was like something primal in him had been awoken,” Markus knows it’s worse for his mother, his father’s constant companion as he deteriorates. Even after a long day at work, Markus knows he can leave, a freedom his mother does not possess; this knowledge brings the uncomfortable realization: “Work, I would think. What did I know / about work? / [ ... ] I’d step outside, / [ … ] looking away from where the real work was taking place,” (from “What Did I Know about Work”).
 
Losing a loved one, whether suddenly or in the painfully protracted manner of Markus’s father, results in a new and precise awareness. For Markus, it’s the mysterious visits of birds, loaded with a meaning just beyond his grasp. No matter how terrible things are, whether Markus’s father is having a good day or a bad one, the birds appear, enigmatic, detached, ever-present. Markus doesn’t try to figure out whether these visits are random or not—he accepts them, gifts from the same forces that caused his father’s death.

Erica Goss is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Her flash essay, "Just a Big Cat," was one of Creative Nonfiction's top-read stories for 2021. Recent and upcoming publications include The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013–2016. She lives in Eugene, OR, where she teaches, writes, and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

 

Tidal Wave

by Dennis H. Lee
(Passager Books, 2020) 

Reviewed by Erica Goss 

Dennis H. Lee’s award-winning collection Tidal Wave opens with a quote from Captain Newman, M.D., Leo Rosten’s 1961 novel about a World-War-II-army psychiatrist. In the quote, a cynic, a mystic, and a “man who loved reason” are asked what they would do if the island they were on disappeared under a tidal wave. The cynic would indulge his carnal desires, the mystic would make sacrifices and pray, and the man who loved reason would immediately “study how to live under water.” Tidal Wave reflects all three attitudes, with poems that focus on humor, food, and above all, a pragmatic view of the past.

Beginning in early childhood, the poems in Tidal Wave follow the trajectory of a long, well-lived life. In the book’s first poem, “Coney Island–July 4, 1952,” a summer day unfolds, with carefully chosen details describing a comfortable if slightly cloying atmosphere: “Grandma’s beef smoke / oils the underside of leaves” and “chicken fat soaks into brown paper bags.” The poem’s last lines evoke summer’s appeal, as well as its torpor, as seen through the eyes of a child:

I sit on the fire escape with kosher chicken and comics.

Grandma speaks Yiddish into the soup.

Tonight’s sky will be brighter than the Ferris wheel.

These lines evoke childhood in a specific place at a specific time, and a way of life that no longer exists except in the fragments of memory. 

Tidal Wave is not especially nostalgic in tone—the poems don’t reveal an overriding longing for the past, nor do they romanticize it. Instead, they offer a glimpse into how memory operates, as in “Leaning in my tired seat.” As the speaker falls into a half-sleep while riding on a subway train, memories unspool from the present to the recent, and then the very distant past. In that half-awake, half-asleep state, he recalls a grandfather “dreaming of Russia, / of cows in a small fenced pasture along the road he walks carrying / eggs in a basket for his grandmother who had kind blue eyes. Sad, / but kind.” 

The rituals of preparing and consuming food play a major role in this book. In “Arpeggio,” Lee details the sensual qualities of bread:

I liked to tear clumps of challah

from the round braided pile of bread,

squinching the piece in my hand to help

leverage the tearing, then watch it 

slowly rise back to fluff.

The action of “squinching” the bread and watching it rise again is as important as eating it. In the poem, food and its savory delights open a floodgate of potent memories: malteds, bagels, and Maxwell House instant coffee, to which his grandmother added “three teaspoons of / sugar, then slowly poured in heavy cream / so I could watch it spiral and cloud its way down.” The poem reminds us that the taste, aroma, and texture of food have the power to bring back memories.

Eating is not always pleasurable, however. In “Lunch,” the speaker can’t find a group he feels comfortable with, “the accountants are talking baseball / … I don’t know sports,” “the secretaries / … know too much,” “the guys from the plant are too / down-to-earth … / They might just eat you.” The poem brings to mind the classic high school lunchroom scene where an unpopular kid searches for a group to sit with. Similarly, the anticipation of eating something delicious can quickly sour; in “The hand sanitizer at my new bar,” the penetrating odor of hand sanitizer ruins the flavor of peanuts: “my scotch won’t kill it. Not even / jalapeños.”

In “Eating Crab,” Lee compares reading the Bible to eating crab: “I have been tearing through the Bible, / looking for those morsels people / talk about.” The process of eating a crab, with its cracking and pulling meat from small cavities, is an apt metaphor for attempting to glean meaning from a dense and difficult text. As Lee writes about reading the Bible, “the little that reaches my mouth— / well, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.” By the end of the poem, however, he’s found something that justifies that effort:

A few little strands, sweet and succulent,

and I draw them through my lips slowly,

savoring. My hands need washing.

I do not wear a bib. My plate

is filled with cracked discards.

Lee has an ear for the absurd, as in “My Doctor’s Dog,” which expounds on physicians having animals in their offices—a dog, a horse, chickens—following, presumably, the therapy-animal model intended to put their patients at ease. It has the opposite effect on the speaker, who objects to “slobber on the pen” or the way the doctor’s dog “sniffs all over my legs.” He concludes that he’ll need to start a program of “self-healing.” 

“Before you write from the heart” is an irreverent take on the gatekeepers of the literary world. In the poem, the speaker receives advice from an imaginary medical team. We quickly understand that they are editors posing as doctors:

          We will inject

a dye that…will show when you begin

writing from the heart and when you stop.

The patient has no choice but to agree with the findings, “which will have no effect on the content / of any subsequent rejection slips we send.”

Some of these poems veer into darker territory. In “On Dark Wings,” the speaker holds the hand of his dying wife; her impending death filters through the poem with his gradual comprehension. From the “anticipation / … of a vacation” to “her dead hand” with its “gold meaningless band,” the poem gathers itself into grief as it ends, with the speaker too stunned to “even ask the questions.”

In “The Blood Room,” a child observes a patient “knitting needles in your hands, / IV needles stuck into your flesh.” The child’s curiosity regarding the woman knitting is at odds with her shyness; the knitter stays focused on her craft. The poem captures the absurd yet somehow appropriate pairing of IV and knitting needles; the child’s reaction holds these elements together.

Looking back at experiences doesn’t always bring understanding. In the collection’s title poem, “Tidal Wave,” an event that occurred at a beloved lake still mystifies, even after so many years: “what looked like a wall / of water, a giant wave, was coming right at me.” Unprepared for this catastrophe, he simply reacts: “I / dropped my rod and ran for the hotel,” unlike the measured responses of the cynic, the mystic, and the man who loved reason. The poem also reminds us that age doesn’t necessarily lead to wisdom—sometimes reflection just intensifies the confusion.

Tidal Wave shows us how memories lie in wait, so often surfacing during moments when we are otherwise engaged. Accessible and straightforward, and imbued with a wry sense of humor, this book is the work of a poet who’s witnessed an enormous amount of change, and whose memories’ power and energy have not diminished.