After burying my half-brother that afternoon, I asked the cab driver to drop me at my father's shop on Rice Street, two blocks up from the housing projects, where as a child I had so often imagined him, alternately captaining a ship through far-off lands, or swilling cheap wine under a bridge with the other derelicts. But here I was, surprising him, weighted and imbalanced with grief and a lifetime of questions which I could not bring myself to articulate, even now. He moved, at his ease, through rows of carpet and color samples, walls stacked with gallon drums of paint, back to his wood-paneled office. I noticed the pigmentation of his hands had receded, leaving patches the color of lard shining through, or the underside of a painting that has begun to chip. "Well..." he began, offhandedly, "you and I just kind of went our separate ways" -- as if this were an explanation, as if the child had somehow agreed and denied the father as well. He leaned back in his desk chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows pointed in either direction, asked what I did for a living. I told him that I was a poet, which he failed to acknowledge one way or another. "I mean," he tried again, "What do you do to put money in your pocket?" I shrugged, stammered out one dead-end job or another. It was hard to imagine this most plain-spoken of men ever sweeping my mother off of her feet, however briefly. But wounded people have a way of finding each other, and are privy to a language of their own. It was, in part, why I was here, a product of that wound. This, then, was the earthly kingdom he had constructed, and had chosen again and again. It was, I suppose, a life that he could understand, one of facts and figures, the tangible and the easily stated. I left him to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment