Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » One-Poem Review: If My Father Had Died by Kathleen Hellen

Jun

2009

One-Poem Review: If My Father Had Died by Kathleen Hellen

Posted on 15:54, June 24th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Young writers are often encouraged to eschew words that express that uncertainty, to abandon “seems” for “is”. Having taught composition, I understand the reasoning behind such advice, but Kathleen Hellen‘s If My Father Had Died shows why it needs to be tempered with “usually” or “unless you have a good reason”, for this poem relies upon the modal “might”.

Had she written “I would have braked” and “I would have railed”, I as a reader would have rebelled against the speaker’s tendency to blame all of her current relationship problems upon her childhood and her father’s survival. “Might”, however, I must allow; complex systems theory, after all, tells me to accept that if a butterfly died an hour earlier than it did a hurricane could have been avoided.

Having passed that initial hurdle of belief, I then find myself reviewing the lines to evaluate the likelihood of this particular “might”. It is in this process that I start to wonder if the “[i]nvisible cargo” and “wreckage on the table” imply something more sinister than emotional absence, especially given the mention of a baby. Had “would” given me a strong statement to oppose in the beginning, I would have rejected the poem’s sentiment out of hand and missed this subtle possibility.

Moreover, “might” indicates the speaker’s own uncertainty about her life. Especially when combined with a the use of a train metaphor that at times seems vague, stretched, and disorganized, it gives the reader an impression of a character who doesn’t totally understand her life but knows that one shift in the circumstances of a train accident would (or might?) have changed it dramatically. In this context, it becomes possible to read the final line as addressed not to an external figure (or pair of figures fused in her mind) but to herself; father-lover can mean one who loves her father. A speaker uncertain of herself may thus interrogate herself.