My Lawrence

The future, rain in every syllable and cell, 
comes home later and later, until it's half past 
morning and time to go to work all over again. 
David Herbert Lawrence's collier father working 
his way toward death in little pieces—I could see 
him in the book as I could hear my own breaking 
into the house in the dead middle of the night. 
Work requires a ton and then a lump of coal to build up 
fires like a setting sun you look at and call nature, 
beautiful furnace fires that turn back flesh 
to smoke and ash, back to the drift and ghost 
it comes from. Read everything, the English teachers 
said—I read Lawrence first at a big oak dining table 
in a Quaker reading room, though not, I think, 
the novels but something more like Studies in 
Classic American Literature, literature abridged 
sometimes for children, which Lawrence takes seriously: 
Irving's bowling Dutchmen, Cooper's noble savages, 
Poe's still-living dead, Melville's South Sea natives 
and God in a white whale's head, even Hawthorne's
 scarlet letter worn as a final warning in a fundamental 
Boston surrounded by the trees—brilliant analyses, 
written like short stories, stories like his poems 
or his strange travel essays or his blood-dark 
archetypal fiction, memory when memory fails. 
Thus his imagined father in firelight at the fireplace, 
having at that moment the overwhelming thought 
that this is what his life has come to, a passage 
between impossibilities, morning and evening, climbing 
the ladder into the earth, climbing the ladder back. 
Sons and Lovers, sons and fathers, children's stories—
by the time I got to Paul Morel, the Bottoms and Hell Row 
and the tiny, bricky, garden-patched rowhouses, now part 
of "greater Nottingham," got there literally, too, 
early in the sixties, in search of where he started, 
before his own search for self sent him to Australia, 
America, and Italy, I thought I understood how much 
we feel alone in the company of fathers, how work itself 
is a father: the scene in Women in Love when Gerald Crich 
dives to save his sister and her lover, who lie 
in an embrace at the bottom of a pond, among a living world 
of mud and growth and stone, dives again and again. …
Crich walks finally out of the water covered, alone, 
and says there's room for thousands down there. 
His father, who would own life and death, either weeps 
or tries to strike him or, in the density of prose, 
does both. Then coal dust, or something vaguely like it, 
veiling the autumn air of a Turner English twilight. 
I remember standing cold outside his childhood home. 
It was raining and no one knew who Lawrence was.