My Father and the Quail

Our name in Gaelic is beautiful singer. At least

that’s what my father once told me upon returning

from a business trip in L.A., that he had sat

on a park bench, beside an Englishman, whose first name

was our last, & who, after introductions, leaned

and whispered our meanings

into my father’s ear. For years I believed this, but now?

When I think of my father, I see him kneeling

in white autumn sunlight, on one knee, with a gun

pressed to the head of a snake. It seems preposterous

but it’s true, a day I had lost

until college, an art survey in some darkened auditorium,

when the works of Brueghel clicked past

on the luminous screen. It’s how the moment was:

heavy lines around the mouth as he tightens

each muscle in his face, pencil marks of anguish

beneath the wincing eyes. Brueghel, because

my father’s actions call forth the chaos

of memory, motif, conjures all the children we knew

whose deaths meant some greater cruelty: the hemophiliac’s

tonsillectomy, the boy riding his bike

too fast to the quarry’s edge, the girl swimming

with her mouth full of food, and his other son—

born too early to bear our name—will be drawn by the veins

of the last clinging leaf above his head.

The snake, swollen with quail, isn’t going anywhere

for weeks, slow digesting as the air cools with winter.

So dramatic: a father, a gun, a bullet about to pass

through a snake’s flat, black head

and into the forest floor. The name

of the etching will be My Father and the Quail,

and for years scholars will debate the meaning,

ask, Why shoot a snake when a shovel would do?

and, Where are the quail? But I’ve told you,

the baby quail, all four, swell lumps

down the snake’s dark length. Freshly hatched

that morning, my father, early walking through woods

behind our house, came upon them

testing their legs among wet eggshells, autumn leafs,

four ocean-blue puffballs that must have seemed

like a vision at his feet. He woke me

but when we got there: the snake, four lumps.

How long had it watched the nest, waiting? Or the gun

each time I tell it, it seems less true.

And after years of not knowing, what would it matter

if our name meant something further, meant

a voice raised up beyond speech, a voice

that knows precisely how to send air

from that dark chamber? I don’t live

any differently, but hear it and dream

all the things I carry with me, things I know nothing about—

a song, a gun, some quail, the echo lifting up

into the bare white arms of autumn trees.