Father’s Day
Always listening
He is ninety two years old
My loving father.
6/15/24
KW
I posed in front of your grave like a tourist, got sticky rolling on your kitchen floor when no one could see. When I held your words in my mouth and they praised me, was it for my work or yours? So many times I fell through the mirror held to nature, no longer could I taste the difference between sense and nonsense. Still crawling, a baby, on the floor of your centuries cold kitchen, four hundred years from its last warm hearth, whose life was I living? Better yet, who was I trying to fool?
Reinvention is a form of avoidance;
I overheard in a discussion
I clumsily navigate the divide between fun and self destruction
the rain in the sunshine made me feel more reluctant
I thought I’d met myself but needed a reintroduction
I never wanted to have a baby. Giving birth would be, to me,
the single most terrifying event one could go through.
The pain,
the lack of control,
the responsibility.
The pain.
My mom had us staying with a family when I was six.
My job?
Change the baby’s diaper.
I never ever wanted to have a baby.
My first period in all its shock and goriness
Arrived one summer morning in June.
My dad would have come home and stammered through an explanation
had it not been for a visit from God in the form of
my red-headed black sheep second-cousin
(she dated Black men – how scandalous).
My periods were were abnormal, irregular freaks of nature.
too heavy,
too forever,
months of drought followed by torrential bloody floods,
But a tiny daily pill changed all that,
Freed me to follow in my father’s phlandering footsteps.
The female juxtaposition of my father.
I worked like he did, played like he did, drank like he did
and craved the attention of the opposite sex like he did.
I learned how to get a man’s attention –
the same way Dad’s women bewitched him.
I searched for love
in all the wrong places.
Too many men, too many chances.
But sex for a woman is different
than sex for a man
Because of a woman’s anatomy.
Planned Parenthood gets a bad wrap.
They taught me how to respect myself,
provided birth control without sermons
or an expensive bill, counseled me, saved me from myself.
They never performed an abortion on me,
but they kept me from having a baby.
When I finally got health insurance,
I was looked at with condemnation
When cryosurgery was needed.
You only get genital warts one way,
you Slut.
I begged them to take out all those parts,
Then there would be mo more cancer risk.
I didn’t want to have a baby.
The male doctors looked down at me dismissively,
“You will change your mind, ” they said
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,
(and stay out of random men’s beds).
We will take care of this issue.
We know what is best for you.”
Today, I have a baby sized mass
growing in my uterous.
My gynecologist
did the ultrasound on Wednesday.
“It’s the size of a baby’s head.”
Maybe they will listen this time when I ask them to take out
all the woman parts because
I never wanted to have a baby.
no matter where I am &
no matter how many words
I spend & erase–this a bluegrass
song I write new, each year:
oak tree & riverbank–
a road run through it–
biscuit dust & cigarette smoke,
how it chained around the jamjar light
in the yellowing kitchen. The high lonesome
fits my mouth like a call across the field home.
I can hear it in some songs–this piercing
place, its name my shaded church.
I laugh loud, pull hair, cry out, & miss time.
How I am firm too that I am
never going back. I can’t, not
in the same way.
The days were long, but money mattered,
fifty cents a day helped keep us all fed,
so schooling wasn’t really a question.
I was nine when this picture was taken,
and, yeah, I really smoked that pipe,
carried that pickaxe, the whole thing.
My day started before the sun was fully up,
so I went from darkness to darkness,
no different than the pit ponies I loved.
Back and forth, cleaning up after them,
sniffing the air for gas, carrying dynamite,
the work was hard, but not like the miners’.
At eighteen, I joined the Marines, hard work
I’d trained for since I was a little pit boy,
earned my way up through the ranks fast.
In ‘24, somebody got careless, so bad
everyone on that shift was blown apart,
just like that mortar did me in the Belleau.
(after the circa-1900 photograph captioned,
“Unidentified child, probably at Castle Gate,
Finlander — 9 years old. He worked in the
Castle Gate Mine near the turn of the century.
He carried explosives and searched for “Bad
Air” and cleaned entries from animal debris
and loose coal.”, in the collection of the Utah
State Historical Society; and after the 1946
song lyrics, “Dark as a Dungeon,” by Merle
Travis)
We started with stolen coffee shop kitchen kisses
We upgraded to hand holding on Main Street
We took adventures to alien landscapes
Driving under star-filled skies that left our lungs empty
Our eyes still shining days after
Camping on the edge of civilization
Feeding off each other’s warmth long after the fire’s embers succumbed to the night
It was not all smooth sailing
We hit rocky shores
Tumbled close to catastrophic cliffs
We learned how to love in the way the other needed
We challenged ourselves by leaving home together
Tested whether our love would continue to grow in new climates
We weathered storms that toppled others
We clung to one another as our shelter collapsed around us
We always combed through the rubble for one another
Never content to leave what we had behind
Rebuilding, hand in hand
We stood still when it was easier to walk away
Eventually we outsmarted the storms
We bolstered the barracks
We learned love was not a single battle
But a war
That victory had to be hard fought everyday
That soulmates were not simply destined
But deserved
Standing firm at the post
Hand in hand
