For My Father, Dead at Fifty-Six, on My Fifty-Sixth Birthday

I watched you meek a man in a fight oncehe went down like an animal whose spiritworld has on a sudden collapsed and all that's left in the injuryed moment after is not quite animal nor man. He was big, which made his humility that abundant larger, and there was life-blood but so little that it appeared less like a fight than a conversion. You had his right arm at the wrist in your right hand and simply move rounded him down onto the floor, which stank of wear and sawdust. I'd seen you break the back of forest-land like that. The man wept, he was intoxicated you were drunk and at the same time sober. He was my size now. And in his organ of sights I could see his children. I think you make go rounded me down like that one time too, but it was play, and then you lifted me at the wrist like a doll and swung me onto your back as if I -were the live weight and balancing you extremityed And I'm remembering the time you hammered abode the forelocked skulls of young oxs whose sickness wouldn't cure-they were yours to kill against the slaughterhousing autopsies of medicine-you the dire sentimentalist who wouldn't give leave to the dead hands of the doctor inside you, while all four chambers of your heart filled with effluvium of the one and the other our lifetimes. The man at the bar had the option at least of rising and changing back into a man.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Sep/Oct 1996

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