The Story Goes

Did you ever cry, Granny, as a tiny girl, an old woman,

missing your missing father—sun-stroked in an Illinois field,

so the story goes, and never quite the same (tap the head)

after that. Or torn by some disorder without that helpful word—

found by grandkids in a 1950 census to have spent four decades

behind security hospital bars, having once thrown a man

down a flight of stairs, declared criminally insane. (Dead,

you told your sons, my father died when I was young). It is not

your lie but truth that feeds my terror. Did you decide

to spare your boys that swallowed pain, that shame,

stoic, your mouth ever turning a cheek to their kisses,

to ours, no granddad for them to speak of? Did they know?

Or did you simply fear his seed in them and pray for drought.

Pregnant with my father, holding the hand of a toddler,

did you watch your husband, lost inside, exhausted,

drive off past the last gasp of the Great Depression?

Did he truly leave you three for California gold

as you always told them: that no good S.O.B.,

the family refrain? Did you know he later claimed

he tried to see them but was told to stay away

by your husband? Your sons don’t need you, I imagine

you spat like bloody teeth from the door frame.

They think you nothing but a no good S.O.B. So, he gave up.

You changed Dad’s middle and last name to match

his new father’s, a gentle dairy farmer, who saved them,

like my stepfather saved me, made them tough.

Thank you. If only erasing a father’s name were enough.

I want to think you did it all to stop the secret crying,

so young, so old, the way I did, the way I spent a lifetime

trying to matter to your son after he left us four kids

for his own 70s gold: freedom on a yellow-striped road,

a nurse’s bed—that rumor sent through a slant-lit phone

that shrank my mother down to a mute claw. Still,

I didn’t escape my father’s wily thread: left husbands,

too, for more, for more. Gave up on marriage to live.

Those years I loved him best, Granny, bested him,

your ex and your dad, too. (I wish I knew. I wish I knew.)

My kids would never miss their fathers, never long for me.

We fill the emptiness inside each other like nesting dolls,

seeking, never finding, the smallest nor largest doll—

that ancient animal one that holds or is the core

of us all—nor even the doll we are, just sensing that tiny,

receding, insatiable hole, as if it were only ours.