'The dead say little in their letters...'

 A while back, I posted a moving (to me at least) poem about an old family photograph, written by Ned Balbo, which I linked to a similarly themed and still more moving poem by Donald Justice. Now I find a third poem about the extraordinary emotional power of familial relics by another American poet, Dana Gioia –

Finding a Box of Family Letters

The dead say little in their letters

they haven't said before.

We find no secrets, and yet

how different every sentence sounds

heard across the years.

           

My father breaks my heart

simply by being so young and handsome.

He's half my age, with jet-black hair.

Look at him in his navy uniform

grinning beside his dive-bomber.

 

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.

He says he misses all of us

(though I haven't yet been born).

He writes from places I never knew he saw,

and everyone he mentions now is dead.

 

There is a large, long photograph

curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.

My parents sit uncomfortably

among tables of dark-suited strangers.

The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

 

I wonder what song the band was playing,

just out of frame, as the photographer

arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?

Get out there on the floor and dance! 

You don't have forever.

 

What does it cost to send a postcard

to the underworld? I'll buy

a penny stamp from World War II

and mail it downtown at the old post office

just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

 

Surely the ghost of some postal worker

still makes his nightly rounds, his routine

too tedious for him to notice when it ended.

He works so slowly he moves back in time

carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

 

It's silly to get sentimental.

The dead have moved on. So should we.

But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss

the special expertise of the departed

in clarifying our long-term plans?

 

They never let us forget that the line

between them and us is only temporary.

Get out there and dance! the letters shout,

adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home! 

And soon we will be. See you there.

Dana Gioia, whose work I am only just beginning to discover, is a poet and critic who is very much better known in America than on this side of the Atlantic. His career path makes him unusual among poets: a graduate of Stanford Business School, he rose through the corporate world to become vice-president of General Foods before deciding, in 1992, to devote himself full-time to writing (and, later, being head of the NEA). With his background, his easy, unpretentious manner and his preference for formal verse, he does not fit the prevailing British idea of what A Poet should be.

Here are a couple more by Gioia: this quietly intriguing, dream-like poem –

Equations of the Light

Turning the corner, we discovered it

just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—

a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long   

resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves   

across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window

glowing through the ivy-decked facade

promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all   

the high black doors of houses bolted shut.   

And yet we could have opened any door,   

entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we deluded by the strange

equations of the light, the vagrant wind   

searching the trees, that we believed this brief   

conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,   

a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,   

a curl of smoke flaring from a match,   

haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,   

the smile of a stranger, something beyond

the soft refusals of the summer air

and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.

Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,   

and at the end what else could I have done   

but turn the corner back into my life?

And this, about a feeling we can probably all identify with at some level –

The Letter

And in the end, all that is really left

Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable—

That somehow we deserved something better.   

That somewhere along the line things

Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s   

In charge, which certainly would have set   

Everything straight between us and the world,

Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.   

Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.   

Or sent by mistake to an old address   

Whose new tenant put it on her dresser   

With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting   

To give it to the landlord to forward.   

And we still wait like children who have sent   

Two weeks’ allowance far away   

To answer an enticing advertisement   

From a crumbling, yellow magazine,

Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,   

Checking the postbox with impatient faith   

Even on days when mail is never brought.