Vivian
Shipley USA
A Daughter Is Not Enough
Stringbean is what I
call my father as he sands walnut
he had cut, hauled
to Lexington from the farm before
it was put up for auction.
Translucent as shell cupped
on my ear, he won’t bandanna
his mouth, breathes
in dust as if inhaling his
father, his youth. My talks
with my mother are best
while we are chopping onions,
arguing about leaving red
potato peels on or off for salad.
For my father, I rehash our
road trips, my two sisters
in the Chevy’s backseat
drawing a line on vinyl I dared
not cross, flashlighted road
maps; banging pots to scare
bears away from our tent in
the Smoky Mountains.
Rambling on about burning
slash piles, my father will not
speak of cancer blacklining
bones, only smell of chainsaws,
of clearcuts
in Kentucky, Tennessee. Whorls in the wood
he planes are the color of
old honey in a saucer magnolia
hollowed by insects, but
there’s not a sliver, not a splinter
of sweetness there from him
for me. Fingering the grain
as if he were taking the
wood’s pulse, my father lectures
me about tongue and groove,
oil, how not one drop of stain
is needed for wood darkened
by one hundred years that link
generations I can’t
dovetail. Looping around my mother,
his body didn’t lasso a boy.
My sons ferry my father’s blood
but cannot hook an ID tag
from his flesh onto a new century.
Seeing his name above my
poem gives him no comfort.
With my father, I am still
just a girl. I can’t create a word
to keep him from the dark,
the cold, from what has no name.
© Copyright, 2012,
Vivian Shipley. |