The Father I Carry With Me

Fred Moramarco, professor of literature at San Diego State University and editor of Poetry International, the university's annual journal of contemporary poetry, wrote in 1998 of his father, an Italian immigrant who was 50 at the author's birth. The Father I Carry With Me is a long piece, but worth spending time with, as Moramarco imagines the passionate, ambitious young man his father must have been, and the calm, elderly man - gone since 1966 - he remembers first hand. As Moramarco is 56 at the time of the writing, he finds himself at the very age his father was during the author's first memories of him. When he shaves his beard, he sees the old man hiding there.

Sooner or later men become their fathers. Here I am now six years into the time of his life and his face hovers beneath my beard, his fingers trace mine on the piano keyboard, his mouth sips at the tomato sauce I make each summer. With each year I live I feel more the Father, some archetypal provider who will take care of things. Maybe that's moving from father to grandfather, a grand father figure that knows what the right thing to do is. This is one of the illusions of male life, since both fathers and grandfathers are only men, and the patriarchal roles assigned to men are a burden as well as a pleasure