I remember my father as a six-foot tall, slim, immaculately groomed man who always seemed most at home wearing a shirt and tie. Despite being a pediatrician, my father never seemed all that comfortable with us kids. Invariably aloof and polite, he often seemed to be watching us from a distance while my mother, a former obstetrician, grudgingly managed the household.

They were complete opposites in temperament and style: cool vs. incendiary, logical vs. emotional, tidy vs. cluttered, formal vs. casual. It was as if we kids were imprisoned on a Chinese-Canadian version of the Starship Enterprise with Spock and Kirk as our parents in reversed roles, with the rest of the crew having abandoned ship, while we careened into a wormhole.

My father was admitted to the hospital at the age of 41, and died three months later just before his 42nd birthday. I was 11 years old at the time, and had never had a meaningful conversation with him. Neither of us had known how to talk to the other. The invariable questions about school were answered with the usual monosyllables. I wish I'd been told he was dying and been given a chance to ask him about what his childhood was like when his family fled the Imperial Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, why he ran away as a first year student at Dartmouth College to join the communists in China, how he was viewed with suspicion as a capitalist's son in Beijing, yet reviled as a communist sympathizer in Hong Kong, what it was like to live in Scotland, why he married my mother, his feelings about having daughters, why he brought us all to Canada, his regrets about his life -- but most of all, did he love us, and what did that love actually mean.

Of course, I was too young to even think of those questions, let alone ask them. He would probably have been too sick to answer. And any responses would likely have been sanitized for underage consumption anyway.

Verse for dad

Who we become as adults can be shaped as much by a parent's absence as by a parent's presence while we are growing up. Our family was haunted by our father's death for decades. Remembrance and loss are at the root of the historical origins of Father's Day, and also form the basis of many poems written about fathers by our finest poets, whether they are poems that celebrate moments of connection and awe and delight, or that lament what has been lost, taken or never received -- or poems that intertwine the two.

What our fathers show us or teach us can last a lifetime. A symbolic truth or an enduring insight can sometimes be found within an ordinary activity or event. The poem "Starlight" by American poet Philip Levine remembers being a four-year-old sitting on his careworn father's shoulders to look at the stars -- a small but symbolic moment that profoundly transforms them both.

In "A Grain of Rice", the title poem of Evelyn Lau's wonderful and elegiac book of poetry, A Grain of Rice (Oolichan Books, 2012), the poet recalls through carefully crafted lines how her father instructed her to linger over a single grain of rice: "...His instruction/was to chew it slowly, savour it,/let the starch release and dissolve--/he wanted to teach the child/that even a grain of rice/could yield a store of sweetness/if you were starving." In "Frozen", the poet and her father are within close proximity to each other at a family funeral, yet they do not speak, prolonging an unabated estrangement: "I watched him through the fogged glass/and the shining air. The first time in fifteen years,/the last time in this life...."

The poem "Shredding" by award-winning Ontario poet Maureen Hynes unfolds with a vivid and precise description of the tedious but necessary chore of shredding her deceased father's accumulated piles of documents. While subjected to the drone of the shredder's motor, the poet has a startling flash of memory of her father at the family home before his decline. It's a quietly skillful poem that moves toward a lovely, revivifying epiphany and resolution.

Toronto poet Sue Chenette also excavates key moments and symbolic meaning within the everyday. Her recent book The Bones of His Being (Guernica Editions, 2012) eloquently and unflinchingly details her father's gradual decline, deepening depression and death. In an interview with Open Book Toronto, she discusses her writing process for some of the poems in her book:

"I have mementos -- my dad's wrist watch, a wallet, a square nail he carried in a pocket. Sitting at my desk, I'd take one out and finger it, turn it over until it offered up some sense of his life. I was trying to call him back. Or trying to find who he was: this father, whom I loved and was sure I knew so well, but who deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems were my search for him. "

North Vancouver poet Russell Thornton has also explored his relationship with his father -- present and absent -- through poetry. One of my favourites was a finalist for the 2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize, "Aluminum Beds", which is also included in his stunning and powerful new collection, Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2013). In the poem, the father brings metal beds to the family home which he assembles in front of his children just prior to abandoning the family for good: "...My brothers/fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait/....Through the night,/the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,/unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,/the light of my father's love arrived at last."

The common thread among these poets' poems about their fathers is love -- whether it is love given, love denied, or love salvaged, twisted or damaged beyond repair. And whether you celebrate or do not celebrate Father's Day, and whatever your experience of fatherhood or of being fathered may be, ultimately it is love -- present or absent -- that lies at the core of who, what and how we are in the world.