Fatherhood

Matthew Kirshman

I can feel my father in my womb.

How I have starved for his limbs, his hands, his voice to be reborn in me.

Now I know the taste of fatherhood.

At first, he was but a shadow below the waters of my womb; and then, piecemeal, he began to surface, the bits of him bobbing up in the stream of my senses.

It is as if his life has lain latent in my body, holding some elemental meaning for me.

Last night he came to me, in the likeness of a snapshot of him standing by his own father.

It’s strange to see the two posed together at such a late date.

Some submerged tension flows between them, splits them apart.

The building in the background is probably the hospital, where his parents have come to visit.

My grandfather looks a bearish man, with the same hesitant smile I can picture him wearing when he first came to this country.

My father is also stocky; but that is from the medication he was taking.

And despite his groggy grin, I can tell he’s self-conscious and uncomfortable, like someone naked.

My father was colossal in my dream.

He had something pressing to tell.

And though I can’t recall the words, I am left with a gut feeling, the current of his voice pulsing through me.

I can see myself in him, as if his photo were a double-exposure.

Standing on the steps of that brick building belongs to my own set of memories, so fully have I absorbed my father’s form.

There is such sense in his image that a separate past seems to have been mapped out for me.

Maybe it is the graininess of this photo that accounts for the indistinction of ourselves.

Yet other snapshots also spark in me the seeds of his distant lifetime.

In one snapshot—of myself as an infant cradled in his arms—something seems reversed.

A whole body of fatherly feelings fills me.

I am that man, planting feathery kisses on this new creature’s cheek.

I can hear my own voice cooing into the infant’s ear, the milk of fatherhood pouring from me.

Once, napping with my father, I was nestled next to him, taking in the smell of his scalp.

He had dandruff, and I stared at those flakes and thought they were snow.

Now, lying here, I can feel a child under my own wing.

For my arms have a will of their own, striving after the configurations of my father’s arms.

It is a gift, this pronounced impression of the past.

The twice-born air of my father’s body intoxicates me.

From another photo—of my father crouched by a toddler piling toy blocks in a pyramid—I eye myself.

The man’s glance at the camera strikes me as my own sudden image in a minor; my soul’s echo.

I know him from the inside out; the same vein of feeling flows through both of us.

And the air of his arms, the way they fall from his body, sends a secret flutter through me.

I adore my father with a religious-like ardor.

As a child, I hadn’t any inkling of his illness, but a whispered conception of a wellspring within him.

Though now and then I can catch cadences of the inner voices that charged him to put a pistol to his head.

The sense of his suicide crops up like a memory.

I can place myself there, in the middle of that nightmarish scene, anticipating the bullet’s warm burst in my brain.

Shades of my own voice reproduce his inner workings.

He could not become accustomed to them, and tried to disguise their promptings.

The misfit would stay awake at night, listening to the worming thing within, wary over whether his body had betrayed him.

How bottled up he must have felt with no one in whom to confide.

For in the eyes of others the external condition of fatherhood can look repulsive.

Though I suspect he was privately proud.

I for one am glowing, grown egg-like with the dream of fatherhood, its symptoms now full-blown.

All my thoughts revolve around him.

I wish there were a window in my womb to show off the handsome man floating there.

Strangers on the street would stop and peek and become mesmerized by the blue pools of my father’s eyes, by his athletic limbs, by his faraway smile.

Such a sight would offset my own ungainliness.

He drifts in a kind of limbo now: I can hear him talking in the trance-like trills of a nursery rhyme.

Though days he’s wide awake, we’re as twins attuned to a private language full of double-meanings and inside jokes. I can feel his mouth forming the soul of every sound that crosses my lips. The same silence threads through our thoughts. In a no-man’s land of darkness, my father comes in flashes. Snatches of his husky, hibernating voice will suddenly become crystal clean irrigating my ear with the fertile intonations of an unknown history. There’s knowledge in those grave tones, a sad and sybillic chant. And the subtle motions of his limbs seem to pantomime my life’s new calling. Some strange, heroic destiny is taking shape inside me. Fatherhood — Matthew Kirshman

Up spring the traits of my childhood idol—his passionate hands, the throb of his heart, his arms’ restless rhythm.

As if through a veil of sleep, I sense him: a giant climbing from my body, his shadow upon my skin, his eyes taking me in.