ISSUE: Spring 2004
1
Grown so young she has a name, my father’s
grandmother, Cleavy Rowe, settles into
the portrait’s ancient rocking chair,
having never told a living soul
about her boy who died as
she, for the first time,
holds him.
2
Look, seal-slick and laughing,
all lashes, lips, and glowing teeth,
at this clacketing machine unspooling
the angel who became my father.
Six, seven maybe, diving
into a wave that breaks and breaks.
3
O black-lunged colliers of Wylam,
of Pittsburgh, of Wales,
why do you rise from your graves?
Do you not see how your child, my father,
drives a spike
through the blinding white day?
4
Thick as a mangrove
veined with strangler vines,
the forearm
around my neck
tightens as he sings—
as I touch the gold ring
grown like fence-wire
through mossed bark.
5
Exactly as dark as whatever
swallowed the room:
breeze of Maker’s Mark,
of Captain Black,
O stiff beard-bristles
brush my lips—
6
I don’t know which to prefer,
the scald of shame
or absence.
My father in an eyeless rage
or after.
7
We were always seven
at the table:
me and my brother,
my sister, my mother,
my father, and my father, and my father.
8
Among life’s joking poker-players,
few-calls-makers, and guys
who know a guy who knows a guy,
I always hear my father dickering
the mortician, saying Pop
never paid retail in his life, and would rot
in hell before he’d ride
full-price to heaven.
9
How does the boy become the man
lolling on a gurney?
How could the young nurse know
my father, wagging his index and pinky,
just turned a double play?
Seventeen
as he mumbles through the blue mask, Two
down baby. Two away.
10
Because we are so far away
the zippered strands of DNA
compose themselves like stalks
in a far cornfield, or like dots
of newsprint in a photograph:
of me, my father, and his father’s face
flickering, in fear, across my son.
11
Behind the photograph, behind the photograph,
behind the downward-creeping pane:
he stares as only a dead man stares
when no one living knows his name.
12
Somewhere behind my eyes
it’s snowing in Lilburn.
Always snowing as I ride
his shoulders,
and watch the snow
dust every hill
and valley of my father.
