The Goodness That Must Abide: Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah and House of Fact, House of Ruin by Tom Sleigh

 
A more intimate poem, one focused on Sleigh’s daughter reading Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is the collection’s penultimate “Hannah Reading Hemingway.” Here the poet’s ability to occupy the space of uncertainty is tested, given that a father who knows so much about this earth’s amplified violence and lack of quiet places to exist apart. Perhaps it is the struggle to stand back, as he will in time, that is central to its power as it holds up nineteen-year-old Nick’s loneliness and the speaker’s daughter’s tenderness for him alongside the old waiter’s prayer, “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.” Significantly, the poem does not anticipate including this contemporary daughter’s despair, alongside Nick’s, in the finding of “a clean, well-lighted place.” Instead, true to the ethos of House of Fact, House of Ruin, what is likely “hovering in your [Hannah’s] future… / [my mad Tom world] may seem quaintly / reassuring to what might really be coming….” The poem, too, acknowledges the poet-father’s mortality and that of Hannah’s mother as “this nada that your mother and I are fast becoming” and goes on to ask: “what will outlast our disappearing?” This time there is no humor, no introduction of a tiger, not even a companionable big dog, now toothless and slow, whose endurance might be some proof or testament to the goodness that must abide.
Hannah is the intimately known, fully-embodied daughter behind so many daughters and sons whose lives the poems touch but cannot open because they do not belong or were not born to the speaker. Hannah’s presence, though more  privileged than those others who inhabit the collection, invariably speaks to the responsibility toward a single life and to a parent’s increasing inability to protect that daughter from what he, and her mother, will not be there to guide her through. Sleigh’s identity as poet and as parent invests House of Fact, House of Ruin with more authority and vulnerability. The collection enacts the poet’s engagement and commitment to staying present in what is, ultimately, an unthinkable or “mad Tom” world, as Lear’s Tom (Edgar) experiences it alongside the broken father king. Sleigh, however, is no Lear. Instead, his collection’s stakes are amplified by the knowledge that his daughter—and all of our children—must inhabit and navigate a reality in which “nada” makes absolute sense when language is stripped of its inherent meaning, and along with language, the code of ethics that exist alongside or within it.