Elegy for Han Solo
Remember Han Solo’s face, a painful twist
of surprise and fear frozen in carbonite
and hope that a man can be saved. Remember
the first time we saw Han Solo in the cantina,
a young, dashing rogue with a fast space ship
and a sidekick who made animal sounds
no one else could understand. He was not yet
a man who tried to be a father, like my father
when he came to see me play guitar, the island
hermit braving the smoke and hipsters
of a dive bar for thirty minutes to say hello,
you were great, then vanishing into the night,
back to the woods and perennial shadows
of deer. The last time I saw my father
was in the hospital—the nurses laid his body
out like he had been sleeping there for days,
face frozen in a serene dream about how
we might have lived together at his house,
me and him and his dog. We talked until I ran
out of things to say, and then we talked more
because when Han Solo finally found his son
on that Death Star catwalk, he just wanted to see
his son’s face. Remember Han Solo’s expression
as he died on his son’s blade, a painful twist
of surprise and the knowledge that no one
can save anyone. Remember the last words
Han Solo heard before his body disappeared
into the dark was his son’s whisper: thank you.
Elegy With Great Responsibility
So, you wish you could be a hero, desire
to crawl along the edges of skyscrapers, somersault
into the world wearing a brave new skin. Your father
hasn’t taught you to fight, hasn’t bequeathed
you hood nor mantle, but the kind of grief
that changes a boy, turns his guts to stale air
and twine. You look at death some nights,
stroke its cheek with your palm and know how
different the world could be if you were a spider.
You could spin a line from end of your bed
to the moon—climb through the sky and sling
your body to where your father’s body sleeps
with your name sewn to the insides
of his eyelids, the way you have his name
stitched in cobwebs across your chest,
the way the spider repairs its web every morning
to cover the ravages of night. You are a man,
powerless at the end of your father’s life,
and with great powerlessness comes grief,
cloying and threaded through your bones,
a tether to darkness. It’s hard to promise
to do better next time when time has expired,
harder to live in the world after failing
to take care of the dead.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, and co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. A Kundiman fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.