My dad keeps a tiny book of poetry tucked away on his desk. It’s buried beneath old receipts for campgrounds in North Conway and expired Tollhouse coupons. He’s a bit of packrat, my dad, but he always knows where everything is. Especially that book.
I don’t know if it has a title, or when he even bought it, but the pages are well-worn — poured over again and again. My dad is man of many things, and I often forget that that includes poetry. It’s just hard for me to think of him that way. It’s difficult to imagine his large hands flipping through the pages a mini anthology, calloused fingers pausing on the lines and his brow furrowed in thought. My dad is a handy man, a do-it-yourselfer, a sales guy. He’s not a poet.
Still, he keeps that tiny book.
He keeps it and he reads it. I know he reads it because told me so himself. He told me on the same day he showed me the book for the first time. The day when he asked me to read "Sea Fever" by John Masefield. I didn’t like the poem — not at the time, anyway, because that was back when poetry was something teachers were still trying to beat into me. Back when I never wanted to be a writer. I thought John Masefield was boring, and I couldn’t understand my dad’s insistence for the words laid out on the page before me. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so married to that poem. But I always remembered those words. My dad reading:
I must go down to the seas again.
Long after I had forgotten the title, long after I had forgotten the author, those words remained. They held fast, stuck in my head the same way my dad had spoken them to me. And years passed before they meant anything, before I actually started to write. At first for a degree, and then for myself. I was cracked open in college. I was raw and born anew. I rediscovered poetry, I found my own John Masefield. I found hundreds of John Masefields. And suddenly I realized I could feel what I had seen in my dad’s eyes when he looked at that tiny book.
It was a sense of self. It was freedom. It was an entire ocean and a little house by the bay in Scituate. It was where my dad’s life began and where my life derived from, down by the seas and in drowning in words we couldn’t articulate for ourselves. My dad and I, we’re one and the same. I’ve always known this, but it’s those moments I spend thinking of this poem when it hits me like a freight train. My dad knows me better than anyone else.
And when I stand on the coast of Ireland, more than two thousand miles away, I take comfort in knowing we’re looking at the same sea. That my dad is there, like he’s always been. My laughing fellow-rover, my star to steer by.
