The Heart's Theory of Everything

He set big slabs of river stone
for a path around the antic, theatrical oak,
smack in the center of the yard—
but never finished it, the path. I talk about it, I’ve written
about it, I don’t know why. I don’t know why
he didn’t complete it nor why
I keep wanting to say
something about it, which I can’t. It's not like he said
much of anything about anything. How many mute fathers
of his generation in America
are there, for crying out loud?
He wouldn't talk to me about his job—head guy in data processing
at the big county courthouse, just off the highway by the beach,
that statue of Father Sera
standing stiffly in the flowers on the lawn and staring out
to sea—back when computers
were the size of fathers and fathers brought home punch cards
with secrete codes of ones and zeros or ones and twos
for their kids to mark with crayon.
He wouldn't talk to me about his work
even after I'd come of age, even after I'd been away from home
long enough to go back home, summoned by my mom
to come help out when he was dying, and say goodbye, and simply be around
for her. He wouldn't talk about the war.
Barely mentioned his dream of flying.
Said nothing about the pictures he drew
as a young man and why he gave that up;
nothing about his unloveable stepfather
and rather odd mother— her apparently hysterical
religious inclinations nor how she handled the death
of his father, lost in some violence of ratcheting machinery
on the farm in Oklahoma (what I know, I know only through others)—;
nothing about his work in the southerwestern desert, some aerospace job
in the very same places where the bomb
did its earliest sickening business; nothing at all about golden
California, California of the fifties, golden L.A., golden Glendale and Pasadena—
The older I get, finally, the less he actually said.
Every year it's less and less.
By the time I die, hell,
he will have never said a word.