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American Life in Poetry: Column 519
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Many of us have built models from kits—planes, ships, cars. Here’s Robert Hedin, a Minnesota poet and the director of The Anderson Center at Tower View in Red Wing, trying to assemble a little order while his father is dying. Raising the Titanic
I spent the winter my father died down in the basement,
under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds
of little plastic parts spread out like debris
on the table. And for months while the snow fell
and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco, dying,
I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story,
from steerage to first class, until at last it was done,
stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging.
And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead.
Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline
and placed my father at the railings, my mother
in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.
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