Deliverance

From wherever you are, I guess you’ve seen 

I’ve written all the ways you abandoned me. 

But not today. There will be more: soggy little 

madeleines waiting to unearth more grief, 

but also more of something else I can’t quite find 

one word for: joy? love? warmth? Too simple. 

Your diamonds, Dad, so few in the proverbial rough: 

that matted teddy bear. That antibiotic syringe 

you delivered after midnight from Chicago 

to my Sangamon river childhood fever. 

That Illinois sunset drive—me just home from college 

abroad—you driving us through the low, orange light

of the neighborhood, slow, talking about the meaning 

of life, not the usual Mormon lines, but yours, 

that pithy philosophy earned by imperfect living 

and loving Louis L’Amour as much or more than scripture,

those good ‘ol boy aphorisms only white guys

dream up, pass to sons and son-like daughters 

like campfire liquor. I wasn’t quite the right audience,

but still I polished off every shot, happy just to talk.

That Utah hike, the one that made me cry for hours, 

mountain love our new and short-lived bond. 

That one a few years after that. Two hikes are what 

we got. Our Rocky Mountain smiles. That phone call 

after my second divorce, the one in which I said 

I understood how you could leave and forgave you

and your voice cracked into 3 words: Thank you, buddy.

That other precious, pacing call, the one in which

your recent Lewy bodies diagnosis made you say,

If I ever forget you, just know I’ll never forget you. 

I always wanted more of you. That’s all. Hungry, 

I picked you apart, all your warts and flaws, piled high

your bigot bones to talk myself out of needing you. 

I chewed you up, your every rib of error my fuel. 

I don’t think I am cruel. I even made a costume

out of you, tried on your blues. Learned and buried

you. Birthed, exhumed you from my chest, the whole 

mess of us, no longer a child stuck at the precipice

of your absence, forever six. Today, I am fifty-one, 

full grown, sprung like Athena from your head-

stone. When my throat burns with pride at my own

daughter’s life, firefighter like you, proudly displaying

your retired helmet and walking in your huge boots—

lifting severed legs from cars, their warmth a rising mist; 

pumping life back into crumpled children; shrunken, 

pallid drug addicts; stinking, stained homeless men; 

suburban mothers and CEOs hunched over plates 

of steaks, choked; delivering dogs from flaming 

windows; finding them dead under beds (which makes 

her cry); scolding hotly the father who taped shut 

his disabled daughter’s mouthy mouth, a joke, he said—

I realize while you weren’t saving me, weren’t building 

my bones with the million moments many fathers 

give like milk to children weaning from their mothers, 

that milk of presence, fortitude, you did give thirty 

years of mornings and interrupted sleep to pulling 

countless people out between the legs of death, 

the mother of their worst moment, delivering, saving 

multitudes of sentient beings, every one my mother, 

your mother, in myriad other lives, the Buddha said. 

For this, I thank you, buddy. Your mother, we all, 

are proud, hold you in the arms of our gratitude, promise, 

in turn, with love, to save you—from yourself, your dead, 

that lineage of fathers who left you in the womb.