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Details that Make the Story Real
The Dark Indigo Current
Poems by Thomas R. Smith.
Holy Cow! Press, 2000. 80 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Was it just this morning I touched your hand
good-bye, persuaded by its icy hardness?
In The Dark Indigo Current, Thomas R. Smith allows us to float with him down the river of his father’s life and death. We attend his grief-journey with an awareness that it is in some way our journey, too, whether we have ridden such a current already or can merely anticipate it.
Smith writes of his father’s decline and death with precision, and chooses moments and images that invite us easily into his experience of loss and grief. After getting the phone call to come attend his father’s death, but before arriving at the hospital, there is “this moment with coffee beside the road.” He writes of “the door- / sill that separates life and death” and of looking back at his father’s body in its coffin, “the traveler floating in his open boat.”
From grief, Smith shifts to memory, and his poems of his father’s life have a similarly universal feel. “I was at an age when everything he did / fascinated me, was by definition admirable,” Smith writes in “Admiring My Father.” But father-son love is not that simple, and has an almost archetypical trajectory:
When the midnight sun of my generation rose,
I threw him down in pieces, but now
the old antagonisms drop away
and I’m flooded again with the power of loving him.
“The Bookcase” presents a moment that occurred when that midnight sun had risen, a moment that will feel familiar to anyone who has hurt a parent. But in “Ages of My Father’s Working Life,” Smith brings the perspective of an adult son to the hardships of being a husband-father-provider in a harsh world where hard work is not respected when it occurs in the context of poverty, and a man is forced to do what he must rather than what he loves.
Through it all -- midnight suns and separation and finally illness and death -- Thomas Smith’s poems create a sense of the abiding love between father and son, love that transcends circumstance and mistakes. In a poem that focuses on a primal moment in a man’s life -- the birth of his first child -- Smith recalls his father’s annual birthday phone call in which he would tell, again, the story of the younger Smith’s birth. It has become
. . . one of those things
I miss most
about my father,
his affectionate witness
to three or four details
that made the story real,
and by which again
and again I was born.
“Catharsis” is perhaps a tired word, but it is a vital concept and a necessary experience. The Dark Indigo Current provides strong evidence of the cathartic value of grief, in literature as in life. If there is any doubt that new life comes through death, Thomas R. Smith’s collection puts it to rest.
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