By the time my father started writing poetry, in his early seventies, he was revealing himself far more than I’d ever imagined he would. He had found his form.

I’m a writer. I’m supposed to be able to finesse experience, to put a fine gloss on all I describe in words. But in this situation, I was a fumbler. If I found myself at all, it was through editing his poems. He still calls me his editor, in the fondest way, when he isn’t lost in memories of his South Dakota boyhood, the veiled traumas of his youth, some of which may actually have happened.

My father can still observe his withering mind in action, commenting when it goes off the rails. He’s not just traveling two tracks—reality and denial—but an Escher-like plethora of railroad lines and empty staircases. He says his brain splits everything like a crazy pipe organ.

• • •

In the 1960s, he was handsome, lean and dark-haired, like Gregory Peck, my mother used to say. He was the professor who took student demands at his college to the administration—too old to be a protester himself but young enough to believe in change. My father was indeed Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and I took that for granted. He would always be my supreme upholder of ethics.

But circa 1969, what I remember most is lying on pillows in front of our record player, Dad beside me, my younger brother with blocks or trucks behind us, and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited ringing forth.

My father shifted the arm of the record player, setting the needle at the beginning of the last track on the second side. “Listen,” he said.

A few crackles and pops, then the first iconic chords of “Desolation Row”—not a Dylan hit, but one of his great tangled narratives, his musical poetry, as my father would say, comparing him to Walt Whitman or Robinson Jeffers or Ogden Nash.

They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown…

“Listen to this line, this next line,” my dad would whisper, as we leaned together before that wash of inexorable, acoustic chords. “It’s brilliant.”

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars they’re just pretending to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside

“Dylan is a poet,” he’d say.

• • •

More than forty years later, amid the pipe organ of his mind, my father can still focus. I don’t know how much longer this bittersweet stretch of time will last, but going over his poems sometimes turns him sharp again, even analytical. The summer morning he was supposed to move to a group home, he disagreed with a revision I’d made.
In a poem he wrote about Catullus’s famous elegy to his dead brother, I had changed my father’s use of “Ave, Frater, Ave Atque Vale” to “atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.” My edit came from Catullus’s original, written almost 2,000 years ago.

Yet my father insisted on “Ave, Frater, Ave Atque Vale.” He liked its dirge-like rhythm; he wanted his own English translation, too: “Hail, Brother, and Forever Fare Thee Well.” I told him this sounded more like Tennyson’s nineteenth-century “Frater Ave atque Vale.” That was fine by Dad. He loved Tennyson as much as Dylan or Whitman, and maybe even Catullus—and he was right, of course.

His tiny calligraphed scrawls were illegible, unless one stared for a long time. By June 2010, editing my father’s work had become a joint act of creation, me supplying words that he nodded to happily. But that wasn’t right, either. Not yet.

• • •

As Lady and I look out tonight
On Desolation Row…

When we listened in front of the record player, decades ago, my father’s face would be free of tension, his hazel eyes alight. I wasn’t old enough then to wonder if he thought of himself writing poetry or the poems he’s always wanted to write but couldn’t—all the press of having a job and young children to raise and a wife who’d been in a psychiatric hospital and was still fragile—all the daily cares washed clean.

But I saw joy as my father took in Bob Dylan’s great paean to the impossibility of understanding life and the inevitability of death. He let me in on the joy of words strung together, their music as sung. I saw sorrow, too, but it’s his joy I remember.

Latin Time
By James L. Nichols

AVE, FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE
(Hail, Brother, and Forever Fare Thee Well)

So spoke hard-living Catullus.
Not a bad line
For leaving far behind
This dirty little circus.
Better to visit
A loved one’s shrine
Than to linger longer
in this world’s slime.

Come, let us now enter
A world outside time
And thus to us eternal.

Martha Nichols | Contributor

Martha Nichols is Editor in Chief of Talking Writing, a new online literary magazine that seeks new submissions and a lively community of writers and readers. A long-time journalist and freelance writer, Martha has published in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Youth Today; Salon; and other journals. A former editor at Harvard Business Review, she is currently a contributing editor and blog manager at the Women’s Review of Books. Martha teaches in the journalism program at the Harvard University Extension School. Come find her at Athena’s Head, her website and personal blog; she also cross-posts on Open Salon.

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