I am curious
I have ever reveled in the collection of knowledge
In both the natural sciences
And those sciences we feebly designate as the human
The beauty of distinctions
The way a donax burrows at the beach
Differing so strongly from the method of the sand flea
How Keats achieved fitness of epithet
So much more successfully than his hero Spenser
How Socrates sharpened the moral paradox
While Aristotle touched on all subjects but thinly
And I have preferred depth over breadth
My father was a scientist
And hence to some extent an Aristotelian
But
By his own modest testimony
He did not epitomize the scientific mind
A bit of a dabbler a projector a Schwärmer
An amateur and an enthusiast
Like me curious but nonsystematic
But
Before my birth and in my infancy
He was highly productive and a bit famous
For developments in the techniques and apparatus of tissue culture
And for advances in the synthesis of cancer-treating drugs
Himself a rare survivor of melanoma
But never a theoretician
He was a bit weak in math
And his downfall I believe
Was to insist to himself
That science must be applied to be valuable
He called himself a technocrat
Though he might have missed that term’s political import
I think he meant a technician
After his early successes in research
He devoted himself for a couple of decades
To the project of aquaculture
Involving a genus of large prawns called Macrobrachium
And I acted as his lab assistant
While I acted as the keyboard player of the New Calibre
And acted as Arthur in Camelot
And as Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To the Forum
I totally peaked in high school
But the lab seemed less a lab than a hobbyist’s shop
I used a microscope to observe the growth of larvae
And a simple spectroscope to do some analytical chemistry
My dad had picked me out as a scientist from early days
For he saw my delight in bugs and rocks and rotting tree trucks
We rode the road in cars
We went down to the river in boats
And we chatted while I did most of the talking
The American paranoia about communism
The value of the hippie persona
The fearful notion of hell
And my father expressed his belief
That any decent person will go to heaven
He was an Irish-Catholic but not devout
Like many survivors of the Great Depression
And many veterans of the Second World War
He craved success security and peace and quiet
To pursue his avocations in the unruffled suburb
Burning chicken on the grill
Coaching Little League
Wherein I proved a disappointment
He’d had two aircraft carriers shot out from under him
And the second one at the end of the war
Left him in the hospital for many months
But I knew nothing of this
The struggles of a second son
When the Depression
Had knocked his wealthy family down a few notches
The two Purple Hearts
The reconstruction of his flayed face
But we chatted and I loved him
He scared me
He couldn’t control completely the effect of his wounds
We were always close and grew closer
When in his unaccountably long life
He turned to poetry and painting
And like the technocrat he asked me
How to get published
And I told him what I knew
Condescendingly I’m afraid
And I was reminded of the time
He asked me to teach him the guitar
When he was in his fifties
Don’t be so supercilious he said
But the truth is that a person must study
The beautiful the true and the good
These come not by nature but by art
And a person must appreciate
My poor father was never allowed
To appreciate pleasure for its own sake
To enjoy anything for its own sake
For everything must serve a purpose
He dreamed of profit though he never made any
He never saw that he was inspired
But
Through him and through my mother
Through my beloved and a few friends
A few inspiring teachers
I have been inspired to be inspired
I have found beauty and truth everywhere
A pocket full of bugs in my dungarees
The smell of incense and the peal of an organ
Choir’s harmony and horn’s refrain
Sketchy beauty of a decaying tree trunk
The resourcefulness of an old woman
Laid out on the sidewalk
Spiral in mollusk flower and galaxy
The doors of perception
And a window open to let the warm love in
But
The true the beautiful and the good
Are overlain with falsehood
The doors of perception need cleansing
And how hard can it be to know
That even the morally worst people
Have as much dignity and worth as anyone else