Holding my Father's Hand

They have finished with your heart,

and as I watch you fight

cold blood and anesthesia,

the weight of your hand in mine

is all you are—

like the notepad on your desk

at home, blank and white,

bearing the scar

of a list you carry with you.

It is the first day of school,

and I feel your heavy hand

rough against my back as you pull

the covers down. A baby

could wear your wedding band

around its wrist.

One finger in the ribs

turns me into a monkey.

Now some cruel puppeteer

makes you dance to the stroke

of the respirator, and I hear

whitecaps on the Chesapeake:

you and I alone on the bay,

beating down the windward shore

all afternoon against the tide

til the sun goes, the winds drop,

and tired, chilled to the bone,

trembling so you cannot free

the sheet, you go below,

and I am at the helm alone,

fighting the chop.

I never saw you at your work,

but someone sketched you once

in surgical gown and mask, your back

half-turned, hunched shoulders

and big-boned arms pouring

as if through an hour-glass

into latex gloves poised

on the surface tension of an eye—

it could be an eye—some shape

half-hidden by your gathered form.

“Your Daddy's the real artist,”

said Lem Ward, carver of decoys,

staring at me bottle-eyed

through the thick glasses he wore

after you cut his cataracts.

Far down the bay, in the backwater

of an impoverished fishing town,

out behind Lem's ramshackle house,

in a corner of his cluttered

workshed, a Canada Goose

turns to free its wing

from a block of pine.

I feel you squeeze my hand

as if to pull yourself

up from wherever you are.

You are trembling less,

and your color is returning.

Your hand is warmer now,

and I am letting go.

                                         DL