LAUGHING WITH FATHER
by Elizabeth P. Glixman
My father’s body is dust. Yet darkness never comes.
Light sifts through memory. It is bright.
I think of when he was here, vespers fly through my mind,
Not like praise but like a Halloween witch’s scream
Scaring me to forget. Her crooked nose
Leads down the net path of dreams.
I catch the light find how it weaves
Through the glass prism of wonderland.
No matter how I resist a different shape
My father is on my sleeping pillow
In my supermarket dreams. I pay
for lettuce at the cash register. He speaks.
The world spins without vacation. He tells
Me to not forget the way his hair smelled
Was full and dark, the way his Oldsmobile
hauled newspapers, old mail, cancelled checks,
nose plugging sneakers and Hershey Candy wrappers,
The way his stories were pliable as stale gum,
Only he would laugh at the boredom of this joke.
He tells me to not forget the way he hit the golf ball
No matter if it moved or not or flew
over the lake greens and disappeared. It didn’t matter,
Since he would always exist. Never be plucked.
The day is done. The darkness is full of a light that does not fade.
This dark is a gradation on the color chart of breathing
In a world that never can stop.
I watch late night TV in the blank hours
The shroud of gray filters out howling. I rest
in the dizziness of recall. The wind blows concisely outside
It writes the end chapter in our novel.
The crab apple trees in bloom.
On my pillow or in the supermarket isle he watches
He sings yes, we have no bananas, a favorite song
And tells me the darkness will not come, to go to bed
Drink my milk, Don’t stay up late,
Be a good girl. Never sleep with boys.
Marry well.
Laughing With Father from Cacophony, 2006 by Elizabeth P. Glixman, © 2005.
Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth P. Glixman.
© 2005 Elizabeth P. Glixman, Elizabeth and Her Father
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