Spreading Out Histories This place is no longer the festering humidity of Louisiana; this place is the silence of my family, the silence of myself moving toward something, not entirely unlike anger, or loneliness, but something more intact, more explicit. Everywhere horns rain: cars cussing through intersections, trains rumbling, the radio, and I am not taking it all very well. Do you know what I mean? Even the people around me are barking, guttural. I am not good at writing about my experience because it seems so distant from me. My father, minor league pitcher, threw down drugs in Germany and got thrown out of the military only to come back to his wife and five year old son. My legs dangled over the couch's edge as I licked joints for him--hisown lips and tongue were too dry. Is this what the poem is about, how a child and a father can learn to spread their histories before them, pick the seeds out (who needs a headache?) or is this about how I later watched him at the stove, stirring roast beef hash with a wooden spoon; or how my mother came home, pulled me off the couch, and threw their wedding picture at him; or maybe how glass sparkled in my roast beef hash which was thrown away for a hamburger. At least I don't think they were trying to kill
me. This is all
proportional. I was so small then. And years later, after a party, my dad bought dope from me, a quarter pound, said if you are going to deal, you're going to do it right. It's not as twisted as it might seem, I mean he's a very nice guy, has the smile and the grey
slacks, the eyes that move like spirits. I'm understanding how once we get a few beers into us we look for whores in downtown Toledo, talk about drugs, and intentions, the way we will live our lives. It's all relative, isn't it, the way these things appear here, how I paint this picture? Once I borrowed his truck to go to Ann Arbor and he left a card on the seat-- it was a cheesy hallmark verse, with my name scratched at the top and his signed at the bottom. This is the truth, when I was in rehab my father came to one of my meetings and listened, drank coffee, said, do what you need to do, then left. |
