Chronic/Clinical Deepening

Some say: don’t go to sleep angry.

I.

Sunday school is not suspended this Mother’s Day:

He flips out on a possibility,

dumping a mailbag of unknowns.

I weep and sweat.

II.

I watch his shaving blunders,

the fix-it styptic technique,

expect the cheap cologne.

Draw a shallow breath and run off to the kitchen to inhale the baloney and eggs.

II.

In search of trees and fewer thieves,

we moved out of the Bronx into Queens,

row houses up and down Parsons Boulevard.

In search of milk that first day,

I roam blocks toward the turnpike, then

backtrack past apartments to identical blocks of ivy and hedge.

I cry at the willow, where is my home?

Neighborhood kids run after me

to echo words of my father,

“Come straight home”

and cackle and wait.

Father rescues me one block off course,

Talks up a Saturday movie,

the bridge crossing, and the boats at Central Park.

(Breathe)

IV.

Home for dinner that autumn, I bring him homework.

He chews a bit of brisket, bolts to the Sunday-only car,

turning over thoughts and waits out a jag.

Father leaves for a far-off house,

yields to the nostrum of other men

in the day room and out in the yard.

And what of a 10-year-old son who listens to songs of his father

and shares movies and museums

and fills my head most every day, father, dear father.

V.

In the presence of an analyst

who asks about love for the father and waits for the answer,

my sympathy recedes with father’s spaced returns.

Racing home to chant the news “School of Performing Arts accepted me,”

Father greets me at the front door, in his robe,

with a riff “What time are you coming home tonight?”

Joy: a lonely lap through halls in a lousy junior high.

VI.

Father checks in upstate and downstate.

At Montrose VA Hospital, he joins the multi-war band

And hones a small self, well within a six-month run.

Our lives had lightness though those months — and quiet.

“He’s coming home again, he’s…”

Sister shouts outside the shower door, before a return,

Exposing pretending and dread.

Last hospitalization’s the longest —

Nearby in a ward off a park with a view.

I saw him once in those six years,

Above cloverleafs, highway connections,

Wherein father tamped down a life they say was led.

I was twenty-eight.