More on: father

when I was young, his voice a low path through nightmare,
reading so that I wouldn’t dream of dying . . .

Come up behind me. See through my eyes.

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…

My beloved son, I received your letter where you spoke to me like an adult told me all about how hard you studied at school and where I saw that your passion for learning chased all the darkness and ugliness away as you delved into the secrets of the big book of life You’re confident…

Heaven is a field I am driving an old truck across in the only dream I have on the subject. The sky over that pasture is so blue I know it will burst if it doesn’t turn twenty different reds at evening. The truck is my granddad’s ’72 Ford, still smelling of oilfield and aftershave.…

My aged father and I enjoy the silence between us as we sit in the Adirondacks, watching the children playing tag on the lawn and running in circles, happy to be it or not to be it, happy just to be, though I know they give no thought to being. My father leans toward me…

DON’T TOUCH MY CHILD,” the woman said. She and her son stood in front of me in the checkout line. Her son looked to be four, maybe five. A towhead. I had placed my hand on the short-cropped sunlight for the barest moment. The mother turned the boy toward me and pointed at my face. “Do…

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…