Listen to Tom read “Portrait of My Father as a Snake.” View the full text of the poem in Plume, Issue #147 November 2023.

Tom Sleigh on “Portrait of My Father As a Snake”:

When I saw the Greek funerary relief of a man feeding a snake, who is none other than the spirit of the man’s deceased father, I immediately felt the pathos of the scene. Both father and son are dead, though the son is represented as being alive, standing naked next to his horse and armor, an olive tree growing up beside him, his father-snake caught in mid-motion by the sculptor, his writhing through the branches to feed at his son’s hand far more vibrantly alive than the monumental stillness of the deceased son staring straight at me.

There is a kind of benign gentleness in the snake-father that reminds of my own father. He was certainly the more maternal of my two parents, gentler, milder, a little remote in his lifelong shyness. My mother, an immensely gifted, excitingly flamboyant woman who loved teaching her high school students much more than being a mother—she once told me that motherhood left her at a loss—both commanded and disrupted the household, while he in his quiet way tried to keep things steady.

And the relief, in how it depicts death as a never-ending series of loving obligations between parents and children, even after the children are dead, demonstrates something essential about what you might call my father’s “ethical” sweetness—his ability to recognize in my mother and his three boys, in his friends and even relative strangers, our need for care; his courteous, abiding care that when he gave it, he seemed hardly aware of his own giving. Being with him, to quote Seamus Heaney, “Was intimate and helpful, like a cure/You didn’t notice happening.”

Five weeks after his seventieth birthday, in great pain and mental anguish, he decided to take his own life. But when an old friend came by to take leave of him for the last time, he took her hand, smiled and pressed her palm to his cheek.

He was almost beyond speech by then; and as I knelt beside him, I couldn’t help but ask him over and over if there was anything I could do, anything at all. And true to form, sensing my need as a need not to face what he would shortly do, he did indeed come up with a small task for me; a task, I realize now, that would allow me to show my care for him, but which was really just another instance of his never-ending care for me. He stared fixedly at a seascape in the condo a friend had lent him to die in, and noticing that it hung askew, said his final words: “That painting—straighten it.”

The award-winning author of 11 books, Tom Sleigh is the latest author to be a guest on the Make Meaning Podcast. In this episode from April 21st, 2023, Tom talks with host Lynne Golodner about how his love of language traces back to childhood, when his mother, an English teacher, first read Thoreau aloud. 

That journey continued through decades when he was a war correspondent on the front lines in Lebanon and Syria to his archeologist days in southern Mexico and finally, to the resonance of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which turned us all into isolated individuals yearning for the connection that language brings.

Tom Sleigh about his romance with experience, fancy jackets, and one last visit to the dog beach. With Producer Helena de Groot.

This podcast was recorded May 13, 2022.

Episode 9: Tom Sleigh, Part 1

In this episode conference director Matthew Biberman talks with acclaimed war journalist and poet Tom Sleigh. The author of 11 books of poetry including The Kings Touch, Tom has enjoyed sustained critical praise since the appearance of first collection After One. He has also published translations, plays and two collections of his nonfiction prose, the most recent being The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees. His mid-career turn to war journalism has garnered Sleigh a new audience while making him one America’s essential poets for understanding our world today. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College. The conversation includes discussion of Frank Bidart, Thom Gunn and Robert Pinsky.

Episode 10: Tom Sleigh, Part 2

In this episode conference director Matthew Biberman concludes his conversation with acclaimed war journalist and poet Tom Sleigh. Sleigh reads two poems ("Clearance" and the title piece) from his latest collection The King's Touch (Graywolf 2022). Other topics include surfing and dog sledding, as well as the tradition of the American long poem. While illuminating his own poems "Ending" and "Homage to Basho," Sleigh reminisces about fellow poets Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, and Frank Bidart. For fans and practitioners of contemporary American poetry.

Age of Wonder: Poems from The King’s Touch

A video feature from Graywolf Press and Tom Sleigh