My father stands in boxers,
back to the sea. He holds
my hand. I am five. We are a pair
on this Florida beach. We’ve remained
for years this way in black and white.
At forty-seven he looks ‘washed out,’
a phrase I learned from him,
used by a generation without pigment
spray, or tanning booths, to explain
the pallor of the face in age,
its waxiness from lack of circulation,
its corollaries in cotton fabrics hung
too long in the sun,
or what hurricanes do to ports,
and the conch on the beach
bleached of color.
He was no longer ‘in the pink,’
as his childhood chums would say
of each other when flushed
with health and expectation,
but not washed up, either,
not like the bloated things
that bellied-up and were pushed
away by tides, the undesirable
forms on the sand we stepped around.
Still we are here,
squinting against the sun,
still casting shadows.
In a few years I learned another phrase,
‘Life is cheap,’ he’d say,
Odd, for one who held it so near.
Washed Out by Michael Gessner | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser Set
Michael Gessner was born and raised in Michigan. He earned his BA from Wayne State University and his MA and PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has authored 11 books of poetry, essays, and fiction, most recently Selected Poems (2016). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he has been a finalist and semi-finalist in various competitions, including “Discovery”/The Nation poetry contest, the Pablo Neruda Award, and North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize. Of Selected Poems, Tyler Meier wrote, "Michael Gessner’s oeuvre chimes distinctly and gorgeously with Merrillesque tones, but piqued with Auden’s love of the clear-eyed. His Selected Poems is a collection interested in way-finding across a life’s work; it is Keatsian in its capabilities, both of the negative sort and not."
