Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
Notes
There is something strange about seeing our parents at an age when they were still becoming themselves. In Raymond Carver’s Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year, a young man poses for the camera, holding a string of fish and a bottle of beer, trying to appear confident and at ease. Years later, his son looks at the photograph and recognizes both the performance and the vulnerability it conceals. We inherit more than our parents' features. Their unfinished desires, their disappointments, and the ways they learned to present themselves to the world become part of our own understanding of who we are. Sometimes we recognize ourselves most clearly in what they struggled to become. For November’s theme, The Mask, Carver reminds us that even the most familiar faces remain partly unknowable. The father in the photograph seems to know how a man should look, yet the son sees the uncertainty beneath the pose. Perhaps growing older means discovering that our parents, too, were once trying to become someone. #RaymondCarver #AmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #Masculinity #Father