Erin Redfern

My Father vs. Language

» A fall I had ...
The email subject line            makes what happened
a noun                         modified by an I
that itself is unchanged. The thing about nouns is
            they have no time
built into them.

Dear Erin,
How strange.
Those who love us
almost never use our names. 

I want to let you know what’s been going on.
The main subject desires
an infinitive verb phrase,
which acts like a noun.
The direct object
in the phrase
is another phrase
which has as its object
another phrase
in turn. The subject
of this final phrase
is the relative pronoun
what. Its verb
is present perfect continuous.
My engineer father
           (slow reader,               phonetic speller)
            has engineered a sentence
in which the present tense never ends,
and nothing
has happened to no one.

Tuesday I had a pretty bad fall.
The verb’s second definition,             ‘experience, undergo,’
is perhaps the opposite
                                    of its first:                   ‘to own, to hold.’
Pretty,
from a Germanic base
           meaning ‘trick.’

I did not lose my balance or trip. My legs simply collapsed.
The legs are
and are not the I.
Call it synecdoche, or
being alive. 

I was filling the bird feeder.
                        Up-
scattered in branches, what did
            the rosy host    of finches think?

No problems since then.
            Four days
out of how many
left?

I’m reluctant to tell you because I don’t want you to worry.
The nouns
and pretend nouns
that stopped time
are here reduced
to an I and a you.
My father, maker of circuits—
how does he make these sentences
do his bidding?          
I can barely read         for their wailing
                                    so unwilling
                        were they
                                                to be written.

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Erin Redfern’s work has recently appeared in Rattle, The Hopkins Review, New Ohio Review and The Massachusetts Review. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University, where she was a Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. She has served as poetry judge for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts Festival and a reader for Poetry Center San Jose’s Caesura and DMQ Review. erinredfern.org