The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Blas Falconer is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
When I opened the large envelope containing copies of Rara Avis last week and held the book in my hands for the first time, I was overwhelmed to see all the poems bound together at last. I recall how it started. Not the first poem, but the first poem that gave me some insight into what this book might be.
“Long Gone” renders a moment in the car with my two boys, as they grew more rambunctious, distracting me from the road and the potential dangers that lay ahead. As I revised, I could see that the poem was also hinting at the dangers I had faced to get there. And how those challenges related to a fear that looked like anger rising within me.
Because
the boys
will not stop
fighting, I hit
the
brakes and
turn around,
staring them
down, the
words,
loud and cruel,
rushing from
my mouth,
until they
cower in
their seats, and when
I’m done,
angrier
than even I
understand,
the
younger says,
He
scared me,
as if I’m not
there, the way years
from now, driving,
he might confess—He
scared me
sometimes—to his
brother, the road
ending
abruptly
at a field of trees
they can’t see through
and must
guess
instead what lies
beyond it.
Reading the poem, I wondered, What was behind those trees? That seemed like a path that I needed to follow.
This need to explore the subjects of fatherhood, my growing fear for my children, and to question the use (or misuse) of authority was further magnified when I wrote “Strata,” a poem that unfolded in its composition to reveal my son’s own need to distance himself from me.
You don’t understand, he says again,
from the backseat of the car, my son,
who only months ago could not fall
asleep before whispering, first, some
secret in my ear. When I look
in the rearview, he turns toward peaks
in the distance, and when I ask him
to explain, shaking his head, he sighs as if
it isn’t worth the trouble. I had
the same words for my father, and one day,
cursing, pushed him through the doorway
with the full strength of the body I had
grown into. At forty-five, he could
have pinned me to the wall, but at
what cost? It’s a story we don’t like
to tell. My son and I ride in silence
until he asks how long it takes
to get there, an apology in the sound
of his voice if not the words. I do
understand. Not long,
I say, as we drive
through desert mountains that have stood
for six million years, and which I once thought
looked like the fallen bodies of giants,
gods
grown over with yellow grass.
As the two make their way, the father hopes for the closeness he and his son once shared even as he remembers his own need as an adolescent son years before to insist on his independence. In that memory, the speaker acknowledges his own father’s restraint, how he must have watched with sadness this common event between parent and child.
I can’t help, now, but think of a conversation I had recently with a poet who described having a similar experience with her once tender son. One day she could see in his eyes almost a repulsion when he looked at her. She said that this rupture in adolescence is tied to our own evolution. Consider, she went on, how thousands of years ago, in smaller tribes, genetic variation was essential, how the young man might go off in search of other communities. The poet suspected that the teen experienced this compulsion to break out of the smaller family unit on an olfactory level. The poet reassured me that, after a handful of years, the son she once knew returned.
My understanding of my son’s need to define himself as distinct from me, to define his place in the room were largely informed by a number of particulars, including his adoption—the idea that another, perhaps better or ideal father existed out in the world, one with whom he might better relate, one in whom he might see himself—and my own father’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Some poems, such as “My Son Wants to Know Who His Biological Father Is,” explicitly addresses my own insecurities even as I encouraged my son to express his curiosity about his natural parents. Other poems imagine my father, on the other side of the country, facing a grave and terrifying illness, largely alone—alone because of his stoic nature, alone because of COVID’s global quarantine. These poems revealed, not only my father’s stoicism, but his quiet gentleness, his instincts to protect those he loved. Consider this excerpt from “Son.”
When the car stopped in front of the
house that night
after
the long drive, my father lifted me
from the back seat. He’s awake, my brother said,
Asleep, my sister, their small shoes
turning stones
on the narrow path. I didn’t open my
eyes
but
could smell my father’s breath, warm and sweet.
Is
not, Is too—they argued as
I floated like
a
dream through the dark above them,
cradled under the great branch. The roots pushed deeper
into
the soft ground. I was neither, of course,
or both. The sound of the key as it
entered the lock.
The
sound of the door swinging open. Closed.
The poem acknowledges, I hope, how the loving gesture makes a lifelong impression, an imprint on a cellular level.
Of course, the book explores other subjects under the themes of evolving relationships and the questions of authority within them. Some poems (i.e., “Forgiven”) address the hold that lovers might have on one another, even after the relationship has ended, even after the beloved has died. Poems question and critique power dynamics that women (“Figura Serpentinata”), people of color (“Fatherland”), and members of the queer community (“Reconciliation”) are often subjected to daily. Poems consider religion, history, myth, and art. One poem (“Conversion”) suggests a suspicion of the command that poetic inspiration might have on the poet. Together, the poems study the roles we take on and relinquish in various relationships.
When I began years ago writing what would become Rara Avis, I didn’t know where it would lead me, but from the moment I drafted the first poem to the day I finalized the collection’s sequence, it has repeatedly posed the question, What powers shape us into who we become? And together, I hope, the poems answer this question in their own way. The book’s dedication—"For you. For the you before you and the one before that”—addresses all the people who come in and out of our lives. But in my mind, this book is for my father, who in the end survived the brutal disease as well as the extreme treatment he bore to overcome it. He remains, in many ways, an example of the very best among us, someone I can only aspire to be.
My Son Wants to Know Who His Biological Father Is
My son wants to know
his name. What does he
look like? What does
he like? My son swims
four days a week. When my son swims
underwater, he glides
between strokes. When he glides underwater, he is
an arrow aimed
at a wall. Four days a week, his coach says,
Count—1…2…—before
coming up for air.
My father had blue eyes, blonde hair,
though mine are brown.
My father could not speak
Spanish and wondered, How
can you love
another man? We rarely touched.
When my son
is counting, I count
with him. I say, I am
your father, too. 1…2…
The Conversion
You picked them this morning from
a tree in the corner of the yard. You liked the way
the stem gave to your pull, how the branch lifted,
the scent of rinds, after, on your hands.
In Caravaggio’s Conversion
on the Way
to Damascus, the man, fallen from
his horse onto the road, eyes closed, lifts his hands
into the light, pushing away, grasping—which
is it?—the source of his illumination, which
you cannot see. You
place the bowl of lemons
in the middle of the table. Look
how bright they shine. Don’t look.
Blas Falconer is the author of Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light as well as the co-editor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. The recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award from Poets and Writers, he teaches in San Diego State University’s MFA program and is the Editor-in-Chief at Poetry International Online.
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