Nothing Says Quality Time Like Being Kidnapped by Dad

Nothing Says Quality Time Like Being Kidnapped by Dad

My Father, My Aerialist

“And he forged on the shield . . . wedding feasts . . .
and the young men came dancing . . .” – The Iliad

What money he made, he hid inside his jacket pocket 
And came back home to smoke the cheapest weed he found

In Lackawanna—he’d leave to buy Rolling Rock
With fresh blue cash from Ruth’s pawned locket.

Does everyone burn to know how strong their father
Was when they were young or am I lonely as a flag

Above an ocean, flown in warning for those approaching?
On days that end in day, I strut for cash and lie

Camouflaged in a leaf-suit; distance and proximity
Are both not my enemies. I want to know where you are

Or are you hiding from me now? Among my friends,
Among the trees, along the beachside avenues where sago

Palms cookout the breeze and bob with barley—let’s go
Someplace else. I swear to God, tomorrow I am 

Getting up early. When I was a baby in Florida, 
We lived off Summer and Thomas for a while

Until he kind of kidnapped me and didn’t say
Where we were going or when we’d be back

So I lived in the backseat of a Cadillac
For a few nights and days. We ate snacks 

For dinner like donuts and peanuts. 
I played hide-under-the-seat in Georgia 

And count-the-amount of birds
In the South. In a Carolina,

We met some people named Raiford,
Kingsley, and Cecil and they got in the car

So I had less room for car-gymnastics—no pouts
Or else no outside-time; I lived outside of time.

I got scared when Cecil fell asleep while driving 
And Raif yelled until we swerved into the straight

And narrow. Eventually, I became a crow,
A lookout dude with peeled eyes 

Because nobody else could see straight
What the hell-all was going on in front of them—

What are we going to do now? hide it
Throw it out the window, eat it, I don’t give a fuck,

Feed it to the kid—against the car, all of you—
Diamonds flat dazzled, this mosh pit’s heroic;

I saw what I saw and now that I know it
      I move myself closer to see it again:

Two-by-two, the young chests flexed by and each
      Boy reached back for a girl who turned to laugh

With her friends holding hands with her friends
      Who followed behind in a line on their way—

On their way to a wedding, on their way to a dance,
      Going home for a wedding of a friend of a friend’s—

I know the pinch of the handcuff
      Like placing my face in a thick azalea

Bush after an early April rain—
      And the Shield of Achilles shone like a disc 

As big as a doorway and thick as a crib—
      Long ago, in Greco-land, they sang of people working—

Anti-Portrait

My father used to bang nails into beams above New 
York; he made high-rises rise from blueprints. He 
Walked the sky on a wire, hair down to his back.

Minding nobody’s business (they all were) up there
Elevated to a needle in the scaffold of a city 
Constructing rooms in midair for strangers.

My mother was in the hospital air, elsewhere,
Putting people back together, making blood stay 
In the body’s ocean of blood that is life;

So each day they sutured and hammered 
Worlds into people for new people who sit
In skyscraper cubicles in leather desk chairs

Trading or calling or jawing for Real
Estate dealers who peek out of windows to lean 
Back on stasis: a life an Ironworker made.

Or they’re floating in suspension on a bridge 
Made of steel.
I have lost my head on a bridge and thought

The wind off the river felt chill on my face;
To be alive and unknowing your fate as a father
Or sundown to shadow they haunt you together.

Who exactly do you want to be with? My father
Welded beams-to-be-beams on a wire in a bar-harness.
My aerialist on a beam, sewing platforms across

The space between places, the gaps in the making.
He hi-wired on lines and moved the cross
-sections for the rebar to be hoisted aloft.

He attached each piece in his workshop of air,
Hammering and splitting and cinching together
Buildings for places for people not there.

My mother was with him, in his head in the sun
As she put back together the people undone.
I am a product of man with a hammer—

He married a nurse and they swam together.
Every ocean is an ocean, and blood is the blood;
What makers make makers for murmurs 

In return? We make what we make, then nothing. 
We’re done—hammers and splints and finches 
All gathered with quizzical pigeons 

Perched on a cold bar—he works
With the birds in the clear, chill air
Where people daydreaming in scrapers awaken

To see their reflection in the City above
Like balloons let go of in a burst of a gust.
They pinch in-and-out with their fingers

To check on their money and messages for more
As windowpanes brighten like letters
On tables where kitchen light passes

Through hanging fruit baskets
As over your world, a prickly calm passes
Like wind off the river that chills on your face; 

I am the shadow that passes once over
This place. I wander you now;
I live in the body.