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Michael Shorb
My Father's Garage on Christmas Night
Back after all these years and older
The silence better, more like
Friendship, two neighbors
Rooting for the same team.
The rafters are filled with the detritus
Of mutual lives:
a tent we used
For camping at Big Bear Lake, a punching
Bag nobody hits now, a sister's furniture.
And your workbench is piled higher
Than ever with a hundred
Accomplished or forgotten
Repairs and adjustments,
Power sander and soldering iron askew,
A wood box filled with broken things
Waiting to be renewed.
This is what you ended up with.
A garage domain, a world of certain things,
Perfect fits.
I don't question it anymore.
Perhaps half lost
in worlds of ideas
and stale perplexions of beauty
I even envy this yoga of wood
And metal tightly joined, of things
Held down by bolts, nuts and industrial glue.
There are the once-shared, never mentioned things.
How your father took you, a small boy, down
The creaking cage into the coal mine's chambers
Where a miner gave you a perfect fish fossil
Shape entombed on slate from the Cambrian
Age of Pennsylvania, or how you smuggled
Corn whiskey jugs secreted in milk cans,
Running along back country roads
Raw winter mornings, your genealogy project
Tracing ancestors back to a voyage
To Baltimore aboard the Speedwell in 1762.
*
Yet admiring this platter you once fashioned,
Quail in flight across smoky plastic sky,
I praise it perhaps too much
Or awkwardly
meaning a hundred appreciations
Left unspoken, meaning
To say you weren't what I thought
That you never understood
The anger of your sons, the drugs,
The grasping for roads--
America has nothing to do
With this. There's just the two of us,
Looking more alike than
We realize, feeling
What we don't know
How to say.
Copyright (c) Michael Shorb, 2005. All rights reserved.
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