Father’s Day with Rudolph Bloom and Space Junk

Cal Freeman

It’s Bloomsday on Father’s Day this year,

and I’m inevitably thinking of my dad

three years gone while reading about Rudolph Bloom

née Virag, yellow poison streaks around his jowls,

and little Rudy gone within a few shallow breaths

of being born. My sister told me recently

that our father’s ancestors were likely Jewish

but were bullied into going underground

in 19th century Tulsa, Oklahoma.

How much of ourselves they ask us to repudiate,

they the ingnominious and if we’re able to repudiate

this stuff how much of ourselves it couldn’t have ever been,

and for how little it could be unseen, the intercourse of lives

miraculous and dear, as Delmore Schwartz,

the avid Joycean, once wrote.

I wish I’d know my father’s father.

Ineluctable modality of the visible, I read.

My repetitions are the shadow of a box kite on a lawn.

Nothing’s clear in the periphery when the uselessly

lachrymose junks up a beautiful afternoon.

I mistake a bag of player’s sand in the horse shoe pit

for a yellow dog. Garryowen in a pit

full of weeds, stakes rusted, paint chipped.

Nobody left to throw with.

The ghost of Rudolph Virag follows

his boy Leopold through Chapelizod streets

and scolds him for getting drunk, for forgetting

who he is in the numinous, ethereal sense.

Some morning long ago at Clark Park

in Southwest Detroit, I dignify the flight

of a pigeon with the French noun “oiseau”

while my father laughs. Metaphysics on

Grafton Street or Vernor Highway or I-75.

At a bar in the old neighborhood,

I ask for another round and she grabs the Kessler,

my grandfather John Calvin Senior’s whiskey.

A cirrhotic hemorrhage killed him at 60.

It’s two over, I say. The voice of my friend

Rudy down the rail associates the Kessler with space

scenarios, the Kessler Syndrome, a nightmare

of endless collisions of decommissioned

satellites, scurfed junk. I read of parallax

and a binary star that functions as an ecliptic

of itself on the day of Garryowen’s birth. Ridiculous

omen, ridiculous name for a cur. Yes yes,

that’s the CC, I stutter as she finds the right bottle.

Leopold Bloom watches the silver jingle

in the young man’s palm and decides to follow him.

He’s friends with his father and worries

that he’ll piss it all away.