Poem for Dad
Mayah DeMartino
My father’s body is weary,
wrought full of steel rods and pins and chain links to hold him together.
He is a skeleton and a scaffolding,
billowing plastic hung in empty space where a wall might go someday,
pencil marks on plywood as sketches
for a would-be kitchen and has-been dining room
and a bedroom where his daughter grew up.
I wonder if he misses when his body was whole.
His shoulders rest as a banner between the beams of his arms
and I imagine him slowly sinking into the earth in age—
a house being swallowed up by a marsh,
furniture and all, history and all, dishes on the table and
turn the lights off when you leave, like I always tell you…
I rear back from this deterioration
eyes watching, unmoving
dutifully bearing witness to an expression of ache he feels
alone,
bearing witness to his fresh inabilities,
bearing witness to the grit of his still-abilities
or stabilities;
when a body stabilizes itself this is an act of homeostasis,
a forced rebalance to equalize shifts a thousand and one times,
blood pressure and insulin and energy and redirection of pain.
Without a rebalance, though,
this process is just stasis—
stagnant wells of water, blood pooling in joints and muscles stiffening.
My martyrdom campaign is not to die, but to mourn for someone else,
mourning something still in front of me,
a preemptive processing of loss,
a second-hand sadness for a body that was not my own.
I found a letter written to me.
It began, when you read this, I won’t be…
and I dropped it like it was burning.
Letters from the dead while the dead are not is nearly sacrilegious.
He might not even miss himself as he was,
I watch him lying down with his eyes upraised towards the ceiling
and wonder if prays
and wonder what he prays for if he does,
an end? a reprieve? a twenty-year old self
kneeling next to a greyhound in a photo outside his parent’s home?
I wonder if he mourns himself
I wish for excess and redundancy and needless moreness,
to wish for him not as he is, at his expense,
is to say to a cracked smiling face
I wish you were happy.
Forgive my unpracticed hands and wishes and absolute misunderstandings
and cravings to place my feet so directly in your shoes
that I can feel every flared nerve ending
and spike of something that isn’t comfort.
When do you feel rest
Does your body ever allow you stasis as a reward
instead of a symptom of a mechanical malfunction?
I do not believe in god but I pray for you.