After Philip Levine, You Can Have It
My grayed father emerges from his brightly lit cave
and shuts the creaky door of his office.
The TV clicks and hums,
Overlapping, smugly undercut phrases,
dealt by heavy chins slavering indecencies.
The sound of entitled murmur spills sweetly
like warm honey, tacky but glowing with an enticing light.
I must have it,
he says.
.
The lights’s glare suffocates the shadows that caress
the slight stubble on his jaw
reflecting on his glistening skull
and carelessly bleaching the walls of the living room
like the harsh, merciless sun. He will rise
under the early morning sun
and retreat to his cave again before I wake.
.
Nineteen years have crept by and I see now
the veiled truth
That every child
has one humble, righteous, almighty god who will kneel to kiss the feet of those
who have wronged and will wrong him
.
and that together, she
and he are really only one little boy
carrying an aching stomach, never full,
eyes yellowed from dusty roads, a mouth open wide for more
screaming, Will I ever make it?
.
We were young together
for such a short time always asunder
The shiny, fresh picture on my desk stared from behind the
frame with darling pink letters
spelling Daddy loves you
as its voice rang through the phone, singing Hi, baby
.
When my father arrived here,
our home screamed with opportunity,
the streets were flooded with untouchable gold,
for there was hope for sweet love, for life here, and now
that first year has become foggy in our memory, muddled
with dissatisfaction, unending desire, resigned settlement,
faded wedding certificates, asset placement.
Passion nodded off. Success gave way to insatiability.
.
All day behind the shop he had bowed,
bending beneath the low ceiling that seemed to sag
with its own weight, heavy as unspent desire.
The shelves leaned forward, pressing in,
whispering knowledge in scraps he could gather
into his hollow, eager cheeks.
.
The brilliant, early Michigan snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters.
Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,
.
and that grass was trampled
by the feet of starving, overfull men.
I give you back our novice days
I hold before you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the picture framed,
and the young voice on the phone
.
whispering Hi, baby.
Give me back my hopeful father, zealous
and dreaming, with wired glasses and a burning heart
for good and a bleeding soul that spills into
the crevices of creation and says, I want us to make it.
