My Papa’s Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
(Theodore Roethke)
I used to think there was something dark about this poem, when I first read it a long time ago — that there was some kind of dark comedy portrayal of abuse thinly disguised as love, but when I came across it again this evening, I see that really, it isn’t. I’m pretty sure Roethke is simply saying that childhood hurts, because as a small boy, he is a tiny person who has to deal with adult-sized cracks in the sidewalks and belt-buckles, and have adult-sized forces exerted upon him, and that in the end they’re just the casual accidents of love, to be overlooked.
Which makes me wonder sometimes whether I was really experiencing the same sort of thing. But no… it wasn’t, and I wasn’t; and nothing was an accident because they were deliberate and meant to inflict pain.
What is it that causes people of be ashamed of things like this? Surely we are not at fault, and surely it could not be that we fear we’ll be seen as weaklings… because naturally, children are weak. Rather, what is most feared is dismissal. We fear that people will completely disregard us and say, “It really wasn’t that bad; you’re exaggerating and demonizing your father and you ought to be ashamed.” Or maybe even, “Well, my father was a hard-ass too and I dealt with it, so why couldn’t you?”
Spring. A beautiful, new, green, beginning… but ancient in so many ways. The magnolias — by far my favorite part of spring at Princeton — are in full bloom, and their heavy, sweet scent softens everything I associate with them. They always represent the bright side of things to me, but to recognize a bright side means that I also have to acknowledge that there is another side. The tulips, single stemmed, elegant, and scentless, have only one purpose for existence — their short-lived beauty — and so I feel no qualms about plucking them, and I admire them most of all. The pear blossoms that shower white petals everywhere with the slightest puff of breeze (exactly like the ones at the public library at home — undoubtedly the trees are still there, but are the people?) and the ornamental plums, whose willowy, pink-blossom covered branches differ from cherries just so (and remind me that I’m not walking among those trees with you.)
