Poetry catalyzes memory, as other poems featured in JAMA have variously demonstrated. It is used directly among patients with dementia in programs such as the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project to reproducibly beneficial effect. “Missing Father” offers another example of the connections between poetry and memory. The poem both describes actual memories while at the same time seeming to spark more of them. The paradoxical double meaning of the title both reports on and grieves for the lost voice of the storyteller father—he is both absent and an actively yearned-for presence—while the first line’s immediacy of “this morning being” ironically unleashes vivid memories, from the sound of his voice “rising/from the worn pages” of a picture book to the uncanny word-picture of the speaker and her twin sister eagerly awaiting his return from work, “pajamas hanging on us/like wilted petunias.” The poem reanimates them all together as they chant the names of the book’s characters, simultaneously recalling both the tenderness of a distant childhood and enacting poetry’s mooted origins in the passing down of community wisdom through incantatory language. Yet even as poetry facilitates such recollection, and helps sustain the more practical, trying search for “nursing homes close and affordable,” ultimately it cannot bring back the long-gone, stricken father; instead, it becomes an act of healing, remembering that brighter time of more bearable loss, “a day when the only problem/was a carrot missing from/Mister McGregor’s garden.”
