Cassandra Cleghorn: I Googled My Father’s Name
Nathan Anderson
Golden Hour
...they are not made of gold themselves
but have lain beside something that is made of gold.
Freud, “Screen Memories” (1899)
Just now I Googled my father’s name since
it’s Father’s Day and social media will not
relent until I find him. Buried among
the many men who couldn’t be my father
are two mentions of the man who is
In 2014, he performed at a cafe
from 12 to 1, next year, same city
again for one hour, at a clinic. I drop
my hands to my lap, each palm
rubs the denim pale as sand
so deaf to myself that all I can say is
Is it such a crime to be a big –
I almost wrote nothing, but what if
he reads this, which he won’t – so, yes
then, nothing, and no. No traction
so I toggle tab #2, 24/7 live-cam
above Hog Island where an osprey
and her two chicks stare back at me
from their messy perch on my laptop
long stretches of no apparent action
one fish flown in now and then
by the male who stays just long enough
to join in the eating and the eyeing of sky
I will not think of vigilance or love
pulled as I am into the screen where
the chicks hinge open wide and pink
I grow soft inside, almost coming
to the hunger of it all ‘til Siblicide Alert
warns the website. The strong one turns
on the runt, landing blow upon blow
on the featherless head as if it hates
what it must eat, and the mirror neurons
flare again so I shrink to the form I was
when I must have wanted more
or less than I got. Family, a problem
of proportion, the one, the other, if both
then not in the way we seemed to need
That summer visitation, the three of us
driving through desert, him saying
“If we hurry I can make the sunset”
his film of just the right speed, as if
the power to bring that day to its close
was his and yet also certainly iffy
How often I replay the rushed set-up
of tent and tripod, aluminum poles
fitted together, two girls, one father
burnished frame without predicate
Did he get the shot he so badly wanted
did we know to care apart from his caring
or sleep. A memory does not, as people
are accustomed to say, emerge;
it is formed at the moment of its arousal
I can’t tell what screens what
which the sham and which the gold
how the generic sunset serves me
when the optimal time for repair
is long past. As then in New Mexico
so in Maine now. At nest edge
the runt, still as lichen wisp, gives up
With fingertip I cursor its spine
as Mom grabs in her guiltless beak a stick
and drags it across the nest to where
in osprey-think must be its better place.
I asked him once if he put up a fight
when she took us from him for good
The stick is twice the osprey’s length
she tugs and lurches, a talon catches
on the nest, she shakes it loose
Go, please, stay, what does it matter
what he said. As long as I watch
the osprey’s slow progress, her nudge
of the small grey corpse now no more
than a snag in the order of things
for so long I feel the surge, soundless
in her own soft cunt
Cassandra Cleghorn is the author of Four Weathercocks (Marick Press, 2016). She was educated at University of California, Santa Cruz and at Yale University. Her work has appeared in journals including Paris Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry International, The Common, Narrative and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press. Learn more at www.cassandracleghorn.com
