First Draft

Your Children Reckon with the Heart Attack

I think we wanted you to see wide fields,
like the fields of youth where your father farmed,
wanted you to say there was a heaven
so like our favorite places on the earth
that death did not seem like departure, but
a deeper form of knowing. And I think

that what you didn’t see sent numbness down
our legs, or maybe it just made us sad,
a little more in love ourselves, and less
than willing to believe life isn’t ours
to keep forever. Soon after, Mark’s wife
fell from the copper pony and shattered.

Bones broke skin, the world was leaking fuel,
no landing strip, no guiding voice, no light.
What is prayer for?

Now I realize that what our father
didn’t see was still divine, a blank and
holy need not filled with snapshots of our
past. These eyes aren’t meant for heaven, not yet.

My first draft is loose, conversational, working through thoughts and feelings casually.  I’m playing with ideas to find a focus.  During this stage, I include other things that happened at the same time – my sister-in-law’s fall from her horse – to see whether there’s any productive connection to be made between my dad’s heart attack and her injury.  I think, at first, the poem might be about fragility or vulnerability.  The lines about the world leaking fuel interest me.  I have a series of images to choose from: the field, the pony, the airplane, the camera or snapshot.  They won’t all stay.  I’ll need to sift through them and find the central image, and then keep and develop only the others that complement it.  I’m also working to come to an answer to the question that took me by surprise near the end of the poem: what is prayer for?  It’s a clunky answer right now, but I know I want to reach a resolution that doesn’t abandon faith just because it doesn’t conform to our expectations and the stories we tell about it.

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Second Draft

Your Daughter Reckons with Your Heart Attack

I wanted you to see wide fields,
the fields your father farmed,
wanted you to say heaven was

so like our favorite places on the earth
that death was no departure.
The fields you didn’t see sent numbness

down my arms.  You said it was a blank –
black space, no explanation owed or guaranteed
and now I wonder whether prayer is discipline

or honesty.  Do I cry out?
That week, a sorrel threw my friend.
Do I make that breaking sound

or train myself to higher will, subsumed
by other glory?
It makes me sad some days,

more in love with myself, less
willing to believe this life is mine.
And you: still certain

of the wheat, the harvest stubble,
empty barn where blank and holy need
will amble back to rest.

I close my eyes, make peace,
surrender to the lightless home
before the loved arrive.

The second draft tightens up much of the language with an ear for economy and rhythm.  I’m boiling off the excess water here.  The fields of the first stanza become the dominant image and guide the answer to the question of prayer’s purpose.  The space left by dropping the airplane and snapshots allows me to compare my dad’s response to seeing nothing in his near-death experience, to my own response, tutored by his, in terms of fields and barns.  Rather than preserve another daughter relationship by including my sister-in-law, she becomes a friend, and the horse remains to reinforce the field and farm motif.  I’ve found an answer to the blank black space by the end in the image of a darkened home waiting on its residents to turn on light.

_______

Third Draft

Your Daughter Reckons With the Minutes You Were Gone

I wanted you to see wide fields,
the fields your father farmed,
wanted you to say heaven was

so like our favorite places on the earth
that death was no departure.
The fields you didn’t see sent numbness

down my arms. You said it was a blank –
black space, no explanation owed or guaranteed.
We sat at winter’s stoplight in a car.

You confessed how being back,
if back was what it was, was hard – safe
without some proof of growth,

mission, battlefield. Cocooned inside
the car, steel heart stopped
at an intersection, was prayer discipline

or honesty? Should I cry out?
That week, a sorrel threw my friend.
Did I make that breaking sound

or train myself to higher will, subsumed
by other glory?
It makes me sad some days,

more in love with myself, less
willing to believe this life is mine.
And you: still certain

of the wheat, the harvest stubble,
empty barn where blank and holy need
would amble back for rest.

I closed my eyes, made peace:
surrender to the lightless home
before the loved arrive.

During a workshop with a reader, I discovered the time frame was unclear.  It was hard to tell where the speaker was in relation to the heart attack itself, the report of the black blank, and the resolution.  To clarify, I told my reader the story of a conversation I had with my dad on a drive as he was recuperating.  It included his own response – a common one – to being “back” and not knowing why or what it meant.  There’s a certain pressure to be changed by the nearness of death, and he didn’t feel much different or more infused with purpose.  My reader rightly commented that this perspective of my dad’s own reckoning was what the second draft was missing to bridge the self-conscious gap between situation and question.  Opening the poem at stanza 3 and cutting the awkward “and now I wonder” transition allowed me to include the car, which becomes an apt metaphor for the stopped heart.  It allowed us to inhabit that heart, and those questions, together.