My Father: Three Times

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies. --King Lear

I

When my mother dies
I will cry for my father

losing laughter,
a reason for flowers,
the smell of bacon or garlic,
Saturday Frank Sinatra
crooning through Pine Sol,
arpeggios of her voice
on the phone to all relatives,

while in the next room
he scrawls out Tomes for posterity,
for himself, for the elusive publisher
who won’t ridicule his reading of Hawthorne.
Without her round shape of comfort at night,
He will curl into an armored ball:
Armadillidium vulgare.

When my father dies,
I will cry for myself,

that I am not losing
a Daddy,

that I never learned to kiss him
after adolescence,

that on quiet afternoons,
writing the lines of my own life,

I notice my fist
curling under my chin
like his.

II

Tomorrow my father will lose a kidney,
the source of yin and yang,
so the Chinese say.
I wonder if one kidney is yin,
the other yang,
Siamese twins floating in his abdomen.

Remembering his aphorisms,
a woman’s logic,
you can’t argue with a woman,
that’s  just like a woman,
I say a silent prayer for the doctor to take the yang.

He tells me he’s not afraid of dying,
but of incompetent doctors
yanking it out,
leaving blood vessels hanging unstitched,

and I stifle a laugh,
tell him, “It’s not like pulling a tooth
with a string tied to a doorknob.”

Driving home later, I pass a grove of pecan trees
uprooted,
pulled from their red clay sockets
like bloody limbs,
the giant bones in rows,
joints exposed to the road,
a butcher’s case of foreshanks

and I too fear pain,
not death.

III

When asked to bless our engagement,
the event he prayed for ten years,
my father laughed.
Or so I was told later.

I could have eavesdropped on their hallway conversation,
but I turned the TV up,
wanted them to share a private moment between men,
a rite of passage.

Now I would be a fly on the wall,
to see with a thousand eyes
what gestures were conscious or unconscious,
whether he laughed through his nose or mouth,
whether at the end of all the pontification
about challenges, decision-making,
seeds of inherited weakness,

his face didn’t wrinkle,
his mouth twitch with emotion
at his daughter’s overdue womanhood,
his own mortality.