Death of a Father

The night before your heart surgery,
I visit you in the hospital.
Your blue eyes are sharp as ever,
but the barbed wire between us is gone,
we don't trip over
"Catholic Church," "Nixon," or
"Vietnam,"
like mines in a field.
Instead we talk about the warm weather
in November,
the false spring,
as we avert our eyes
from the raw love quivering between us.
When I leave
I plant a kiss on your cheek
and you say to the nurse,
"This is my daughter, Joan,"
drawing it out so that I can hear
the extra syllable of pride.
Then you fold your tall, athlete's frame
into the wheelchair
and she takes you away,
joking as you go,
I hear your loud Irish laugh
ring out for the last time.

Later that night
they say
you're gone.
But it's not true
because now you are everywhere.

You are hosing down the yard
at the old house
because the boys said I couldn't
skate with them anymore.
So you give me my own ice
and I skate until it is silvered with stars
bright and clear under the hiss of my blades
crystalline,
like your love.

You are a young boy,
asking your grandfather about Ireland.
He tells you he can't talk about it
because he half-starved there,
watched his mother's lips turn green
from eating grass.
But in the middle of the night
he wakes you
to hear his John McCormack records:
"Johnny get up, from the fire get up
and give the man a seat
can't you see he's Mr. McGuire
and he's courting your sister Kate,
you know already well he owns a farm
a little way out of town
Will you get up out of there
be taking the air,
let Mr. McGuire sit down."

You are a young man
in your old neighborhood
playing football, basketball, baseball,
poker for money in the firehouse,
one of the gang,
only you win
the city of New Haven scholarship to Yale,
then Yale Law.
You learn the ways of the upper class,
but some are "big phonies" and "stiffs,"
and the old streets are still in your veins
so you become a lawyer for the poor,
Legal Aid Director,
a Democrat.

You take me to see John Kennedy
when he runs for president.
I'm a little girl,
sitting on your shoulders.
There is Kennedy,
his dark hair shining,
and as he starts to speak
he draws us inside his perimeter of light,
freeze-framed
in the dense October afternoon.

When they kill him,
a piece of Oswald's bullet
seeems to lodge behind your heart,
you cancel all your magazines,
you vote for Nixon,
and our battles begin.
You say I spit on your flag
and your church.
We stop speaking,
for one wasted year.

Soon after they bury you,
winter returns,
with a light snow
as fine as altar lace,
I want to skate
until my toes are numb
and my breath is a fragile cloud
under the North Star
until I see your face
at a shining window,
calling me home.

© Joan Lownds 1999

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