My late father had an extraordinary sense of geography. He loved maps, as I do, and his sense of direction was stunning. Dad first came to the USA in 1959, when he was 24. He was a passenger on a freighter that sailed from Southampton to Miami; at home in England, my father had had a brief romantic liason with a young American woman whose father was a dean at U of M in Coral Gables. But Dad didn’t stay long in the Sunshine State; having secured a fellowship at Berkeley, he spent five days on a Greyhound bus traveling from South Florida to the Bay Area. He saw quite a bit of the country, and decades later, remembered everything he saw and everyone he met on that remarkable trip.
Dad had “big veins” in his hands and forearms; so do I. This Barry Goldensohn poem, which appeared a few weeks ago in the New York Review of Books, is perfect.
Back Roads
After a brief violent storm toppled trees,
deep rooted ones, splayed crowns
across the roads, root balls,
the buried double of the crowns
pulled up as walls of loam in air,
and young ones blown down too,
I drove out to meet my wife and found
most roads blocked, but I knew
the country threeway and fourway roads
like the veins on the back of my hands,
rivers on a map, and I found my way
by zigzag and backtrack till I arrived.
As a child I stared at my father’s hands
in fascination at his bulging veins.
With trivial variations this design
is the common one—rivers that join
at the wrist and tangle up the forearm.
That I can tell my own from anyone’s
is the clinging illusion of uniqueness
given the superior child, the first son,
the golden son. I still navigate by this.
Lovely poem, although I can’t share in the sentiment at the very end (being a younger daughter). My father is a sheet metal worker - he has very rough, coarse hands, with crooked fingers (from being broken), covered in scars, little metal shards embedded in them, worn fingerprints and bruised and broken nails. Some of my most vivid early childhood memories are sitting in church and holding his hand, turning it back and forth to examine it, and then tracing his veins with my fingertips - and pressing them down, gently, and letting them pop up again. Thanks for sharing this.
I’ve got the veins…and the scars…I’m working on the geographic sense [I once showed the bus driver an alternate route, during a flood]…but as an only child who never felt golden or superior, I don’t have the family feeling.
Here in Pugetropolis we have enjoyed a a very colorful autumn and now face the season of splayed crowns across the road and upturned root-balls. So keep an eye out for poems.