THE DAY
If you could take the day by the hand
even now and say Come Father
—W.S. Merwin
The day rises like a rock
in the hand of my father
coming down hard
on my mother’s windshield
as she puts the car
in reverse and speeds
out the driveway
leaving him to wander
raving down the cul-de-sac
the day I learned the language
of spider web cracks
on glass and how to remain
mute in front of social workers
how not to relate
the interior fluencies
of rage and other undertows
I prayed myself into
each night under the covers
sleeping on the floor
so I wouldn’t be dragged
out of bed before the day
could come and choke me
into the silence mantling me
in school bus and classroom
there were so many days
like that one
days flowering kicks cut knuckles
and elbows fists and curses
knees and teeth and fuck you
bitch and slut and fat cunt
the day grew spikes on its back
and gilled itself with despair
the fog pawing my light
and still I prayed and wondered
why my mother
wouldn’t leave him why love
punched holes in drywall
broke dinner plates
took a baseball bat to bedposts
and tv screens but it was more
complicated than all that
the day they took my father in
drugged him and put him
in the psychiatric wing
where we saw him for an instant
my brother and I
he was shrunken and so frail
we barely knew him
decades later the days
I spent with him have accrued
a murky sheen of sorrow
and disgust I try not to dwell on
for the sake of my daughter
and my wife I say let’s make
the day a brocade a rocking horse
a bird on the highest power line
the good milk of being born anew
—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
__________
Dante Di Stefano: “Rereading this poem is painful for me; the subject matter is hard for me to talk about, but, like all poems, I hope this poem is something more than its subject matter, a necessary, albeit broken, music, a journeywork of enduring and shattering stillness I might dwell in with you.”
