Father’s Day Poems

Interesting how fathers show up in poems. Kelli Agodon’s second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, has several great poems about fathers in it (here’s a link to one of them.) Spencer Reece has a poem about his father who worked at Oak Ridge (!! – Just like my “Robot Scientist’s Daughter” series) in the latest issue of Poetry. Spencer Reece, are we long-lost twins?

She Returns to the Floating World does dwell on my relationships with guys – mostly my brothers and husband, but it has a few poems where my father turns up as well. (My new manuscript, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter” is really a tribute to my father.)

So here is a poem for Father’s Day from my new book:

Chaos Theory

Elbow-deep in the guts of tomatoes,
I hunted genes, pulling strand from strand.
DNA patterns bloomed like frost.

Ordering chaos was my father’s talisman;
he hated imprecision, how in language
the word is never exactly the thing itself.

He told us about the garden of the janitor
at the Fernald Superfund site, where mutations
burgeoned in the soil like fractal branchings.

The dahlias and tomatoes he showed to my father,
doubling and tripling in size and variety,
magentas, pinks and reds so bright they blinded,

churning offspring gigantic and marvelous
from that ground sick with uranium.
The janitor smiled proudly. My father nodded,

unable to translate for him the meaning
of all this unnatural beauty.
In his mind he watched the man’s DNA

unraveling, patching itself together again
with wobbling sentry enzymes.
When my father brought this story home,

he never mentioned the janitor’s
slow death from radiation poisoning,
only those roses, those tomatoes.

Happy Father’s Day. Love, Jeannine