My Father's Love Letters

Komunyakaa packs this poem with specific visual details, building each line on the previous one and leading the reader toward the next line. While establishing the setting in the opening lines, the speaker hints that the poem has roots in Komunyakaa’s own home state of Louisiana with the reference to “a can of Jax” (Line 1), a beer produced in New Orleans. The speaker gives the reader the first indication of the father’s blue-collar job in the second line, in which the older man “com[es] home from the mill” (Line 2). Komunyakaa introduces the poem’s primary subject in Line 3: upon arriving home from work, the father would “ask me to write a letter to my mother.” Combined with the title, this line provides the reader with the poem’s plot. The speaker’s father is unable to write and must rely on his son to pen love letters to his estranged wife, all of which contain apologies for his abusive behavior. The speaker’s role as writer provides him with a degree of superiority; instead of demanding the son write these letters, the speaker’s father uses the humbler word “ask” (Line 3).

The speaker immediately complicates the portrait he presents in the opening lines when he introduces the mother as someone “Who sent postcards of desert flowers / Taller than men” (Lines 4-5). Based on these lines, the reader can infer that the mother is absent, an interpretation confirmed in the ensuing lines: “He would beg, / promising to never beat her / Again” (Lines 5-7). The father’s acknowledgement of his abuse of the speaker’s mother leads the speaker to think of his own response to his mother’s absence: “Somehow I was happy / She had gone” (Lines 7-8). Here, the speaker explains that the father’s violence has led the speaker to fear for his mother’s safety, and he would rather the family remain apart than come together. The speaker feels so strongly that he

…sometimes wanted

To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou

Williams’ “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”

Never made the swelling go down (Lines 8-11).

Mary Lou Williams, a well-known jazz pianist of the 1940s and 50s, may have been a favorite of the speaker’s mother’s, and this piece of music may have been particularly soothing to her after the father’s violent outbursts; the speaker’s temptation to remind his mother that the music had little effect on her pain and her injuries reflects that his mother may have established a pattern of tolerating his father’s violence before she finally left.

The speaker turns his attention back to his father at this point, describing his “carpenter’s apron” (Line 12) that “always bulged / With old nails, a claw hammer” (Lines 12-13), and “extension cords / Coiled around his feet” (Lines 14-15). The speaker’s father is a man of action, one who enjoys using his hands, and, like the poet’s father, he works as a carpenter. In contrast to his father’s manual prowess, the son’s skill is observable in his ability to write fluidly: “Words rolled from under the pressure / Of my ballpoint: Love, / Baby, Honey, Please” (Lines 16-18). By listing the terms of endearment, the speaker makes it clear that his proud father is pleading with his estranged wife through the instrument of his son; the father’s desire for his wife to return trumps any embarrassment the father might feel at having his own son write these words. The tone shifts, and grimly, the speaker acknowledges that he and his father “sat in the quiet brutality” / Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, / Lost between sentences…” (Lines 19-21); no matter how much his father begs, the speaker knows that, if his mother returns home, his father will abuse her again. The father dictates the apology while sitting amongst the tools of his trade, but no matter what words he dictates to the speaker, he cannot hide the “brutality” (Line 19) inherent in his person.

The speaker elaborates on the links between his father and his father’s “toolshed” (Line 25) over the next few lines, juxtaposing moments of beauty in between images of coldness and masculine strength. In this toolshed,

The gleam of a five-pound wedge

On the concrete floor

Pulled a sunset

Through the doorway (Lines 22-25).

The speaker suggests that this moment contains the “sunset” (Line 24), or the ending, of the father and mother’s relationship as he “wondered if she laughed / & held them over a gas burner” (Lines 26-27). Even though the speaker allows his father’s feelings to roll “from under the pressure / Of my ballpoint” (Lines 16-17), he knows what his father is unwilling to acknowledge; his mother is unlikely to return, no matter how much he pleads with her, via the son’s penmanship, as “My father could only sign / His name” (Line 28-29).

The son acknowledges his father’s illiteracy with the same directness he employs to discuss the father’s violence towards his mother. He praises his father for his ability to “look at blueprints / & say how many bricks / Formed each wall” (Lines 29-31). Sensitive to beauty, yet unable to respect the boundaries of others, the speaker’s father “stole roses & hyacinths / For his yard” (Lines 32-33). The speaker’s portrait of his complicated father continues as the speaker describes his father “[w]ith eyes closed & fists balled, / Laboring over a simple word” (Lines 34-35). The languages of construction and gardens cannot help the speaker’s father as he tries to dictate the letter to his son. The speaker’s own complicated response to his father manifests in the closing lines of the poem: the act of writing these letters only “almost / Redeemed” (Lines 34-36) the speaker’s father in the speaker’s eyes, but not quite. Just as the speaker is aware of his feelings of relief to know that his mother has escaped from his father, he is aware of his ambivalence towards his father, a man about whom he cares deeply but cannot forgive.