Your Father at Fourteen
Your Father at Fourteen
Already tall, all femur and no thigh,
and tripping on my shadow like a new giraffe.
Not your father, but his epigraph,
and not the rider, but the rider's horse, just feeding
my way through the universe. My eyes
a dirty gas-stove blue, my hair as thick and dirty
as those van Gogh brushstrokes flecked with soil,
shipwrecked bugs, whatever wafted
through that blue Dutch air. I'd walk
to where the wind huddled for warmth
inside the harbour, carrying some comic in my coat,
and smash glass bottles on the pier till I got caught,
perfecting my ambition and regret,
miming rebellion with a fescue cigarette.
I knew the names of birds, but not their calls,
not girls, only their garish names,
which I could coax, if I repeated them,
to drop their living referents like a dress,
revealing stranger nakedness,
and rhythms as translucent as a fire ant's wing.
I couldn't see the ocean from my window,
but could smell its salt, and sometimes hear
the surf revving its engine, stalling eddies
and loquacious jets, the Narrows where
I once hauled up an oxblood octopus,
slashed badly by the hook, and saw
my own reflection settle like a bruise
into its coiling polaroid of skin.
This was the one past I was in.
I spat, and sluffed, and copiously slept,
I slept as if a mustache could be spun from sleep,
or sleep might sugar and ferment even the air
to muscle. I multiplied my best joy
by my hardest grief, and chose to like it here:
the long, dark, winter afternoons, the way
the mayflies hatched in vetch; I wasn't mortal yet:
I hadn't watched you first chew honeydew
or warmed this cup of milk to coax you back to bed.
But one day late in March, I thought, almost, of you:
the adults placed their bets on when the ice
over the lake would break and take the junk cars
left to sink. I dared myself to walk out there,
and got halfway before a long, low groan
revealed a universe of cracks and coming aftershocks.
The ice hummed like a song that I could feel
would end, and soon, bringing the future
with it, shapeless as the teal-grey water,
shadowy, and bright, and almost real.
