![]() My father never again allowed me to see him weep, though it was a revelation to know how profoundly he’d mourned the life he’d taken. Perhaps it was his wife and daughters having witnessed this “failure,” this inadvertent slaughter, that Dad felt so profoundly demoralized and devastated by that accident.Īs children, we don’t often glimpse our parents’ vulnerable sides, their wounds and inner torments, their secret fears or dreads. Surely his experiences in the Army during the war had also taught him this lesson, but there was something deeply unsettling about his car’s collision with the buck, something that disturbed him to his inner core. Inlandia column: Learning from other writers, including those in my classroomīut, unlike my father, Stafford is not the killer of the deer, since he’s “found a deer / dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” In retrospect, I suspect that my father was not only shaken by having ended the life of that majestic creature, but also by the realization that everything in his life could inalterably change in a split second. In the poem, it’s Stafford’s conviction that he’ll save more lives if he removes the doe from the road and then pushes her “into the river.” Related Articles My fingers touching her side brought me the reason -her side was warm her fawn lay there waiting,alive, still, never to be born.Beside that mountain road I hesitated.”īecause both men were part of the “Great Generation” - people who came of age during the Great Depression and who actively served during World War II, my father as a soldier, and Stafford as a conscientious objector - they embraced a sense of civic duty particular to their time. “Traveling through the dark I found a deerdead on the edge of the Wilson River road.It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:that road is narrow to swerve might make more dead.īy glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the carand stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing she had stiffened already, almost cold.I dragged her off she was large in the belly. ![]() How sanguine and assured Stafford’s speaker is, compared with the heightened reaction of my tender-hearted, distraught dad: In my 20s, when I read William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling in the Dark,” I returned to this memory of my father’s accident. I never again saw my father in the same way, this man who kept his sadness wrapped tightly like a bandage around his heart. We drove home in a mournful silence that Christmas Eve. Eventually, he dragged the buck over to the verge, then he returned to our car, wiping bloodied hands on his handkerchief. I was astonished that my father had killed that huge creature, and also bewildered by his sorrow and remorse, which later haunted him for weeks. He cried for a long time, while our mother tried to reassure us. Then my father stood upright, turned his back away from us, his shoulders shaking as he sobbed. He’d left the headlights on, so we watched through the windshield as he walked to the roadside and bent down to examine the inert body of the buck he’d hit. ![]() The frigid black air enveloped us like an omen. Whose side are they on?O myHomunculus, I am ill.I have taken a pill to kill “Out of a gapA million soldiers run,Redcoats, every one. Whenever I read Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Cut,” I relive my childish sense of betrayal, realizing my mom’s mortality. That sight so unnerved my young self that I burst into tears. A bubble of her ruby blood swelled from her sliced skin, then slid down her palm. I was shocked when my mother cut her thumb while cooking dinner one evening in 1956, when we lived in Fontaine-le-Port, France. It’s a cruel loss of innocence to eventually see their mortal coils. They’re celestial gods who’ve mysteriously landed on Earth. Up until adolescence, children often think their parents are invincible, possibly immortal. It latches itself onto strong emotions like fear, anger, or surprise and it won’t let go. Memory is fickle, quixotic and slippery as an eel. Contributing columnist Maurya Simon, a poet and professor at UC Riverside, is writing a book called “My Father’s Daughter: A Memoir in Five Movements.” (Courtesy of Jamie Clifford)
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