Remembering My Dad
A prose poem
His eyes, icy blue like bottomless lakes, powerfully melt Mom’s knees or scold with a stare. Passion hanging on every tear, Old Spice encircling every hug. Me puppy like, following him everywhere and wanting to please. Hands, rough, strong, and able our personal Superhero, never at rest. Air littered with pine’s fragrant dust and the hammer’s echoing crack. It’s magic to my curious eyes how he builds homes out of simple frames while carrying our lives on his back. As if he’s air I inhale him,
into my core, trying my hand at anything he puts his hands to. A Jack-of-all-trades in his many hats. Sweating over sugary vats, we stir in tandem, wait for white-gritty sweet to change to golden-liquid then crystal-hard. Behind the physique of Dad the façade fades to the little boy, his eyes liquid ebbing in defeat or swelling in the brittle’s snap and the taffy’s pull. He instills, life’s abundance is found in treasured acts of kindness as he reads us story after story from the Reader’s Digest, and Sleepy Time tea lulls us into slumber. His sweet tenor voice singing of a boy named Danny whose glens – his glens are calling – echo in my soul. Larger than life, his bodily abundance shriveling in cancer’s wake like a grape, caught in summer’s sun. Had death let him remain at play he would have been 69 today.
