For my father
My friends are writing elegies for their fathers.
I have so much to say about you, and memories
have nothing to do with it. We never met.
You have conned me even more effectively
than all your other gulls and marks.
You conned me into being. Forty years
I held you dead hero or at least Kilroy.
Then when you really died I became
your ghost. Your hairline, chin and gait
returned to haunt those who barely mourned,
while you still con me and I fall for it
again, giving you life.
No
doubt you wore
the Flying Officer's uniform more dashingly
the night you conned my mother than I wear
your face and limbs. Nothing I have written
has had a punchline half as sharp
as Grandmother's signature when you put it
on your prize fiction work, her will.
Did you ever imagine my fantasies,
and was that why you had all those medals
no-one ever won who never left
Sale or Laverton except on leave or awol?
We picked the same Boys' Own stories
to not grow out of.
Once
I wrote,
'Seeking heroics, we become absurd.'
But that was about me. You found heroics
easy as any pose: judge, doctor, engineer.
Post-modern before your time, you had
more style than Walter Mitty. Once you shaped up
against an angry neighbour who had inches,
stone and skill on you. He backed away.
I've swapped audacity for irony.
You never pretended to be
anything less than excellent.
No wonder you could not acknowledge me.
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