The Minefield
I
In the hospital after so strangely
and to his chagrin not dying,
my father scrawled me a note.
In the night, his feet
being cold, he had written
(presumably on that same pad)
to ask the nurse for sox,
and she had patiently explained
that sex was not among her duties.
Puzzling out his writing,
I could tell he thought this
a very funny joke on himself.
Not up to sharing it
like a buddy at the end of the War
in Germany not far
from his ancestors’ village
where the two of them, lost,
slept exhausted on a hillside
which morning revealed
as a minefield, I could only ask,
Who but a ball team
spells it with an x?
II
That night
I turn on the television
and see him on a panel
to discuss trigger-squeeze.
He can’t talk,
and the moderator
fidgets and glances at the camera.
A commercial extols
the taste of whale steak:
like butter. When we come back
the lights gleam from the wheels and rails
of his mobile office.
On my own ill-engineered stool
I straighten a paperclip
more and more precisely.
III
My father’s stroke—which left his mind
alone, froze half his body, took
his walk—stole him and left behind
a statue to my father’s look,
my father’s voice. In school we learned
to call this irony. The grim
vision that calls it just, well-earned,
inevitable, I learned from him.
He’d say to say God struck him dumb—
not countless cigarettes and seas
of coffee—would be to succumb
to comforting hypotheses.
In another dream sonhood invokes:
I burst in out of anywhere
to rattle off a chain of jokes
and dance around his silver chair.
Uncanny Daddy
When you were three
kiddo
for reasons lost to time
I shaved off beard and mustache,
and when I came downstairs
you smiled
the way you still do
at strangers, till I said
something and you caught my voice
and burst into tears.
Alien is OK
until it springs
from behind someone you knew.
It was almost another
year before I left. Kiddo,
it was never you.
