by George Dickerson
Ambushed by news
That blizzarded the heart...
(Hey, bartender! One more on the rocks,
One more for the frost-heaved road!)
What folklorist foretold a kelpie lurked
Under the mirror of our skating pond--
Cackling with quick-shattering ice?
By a wintry subterfuge,
My boyish wayfarer's feet
Were grabbed, yanked down
In water as frigid as all yesterdays.
Shivering, I clattered out
And crunched toward home,
A foolish kid on awkward stilts
Of pants like frozen boards--
Not finding an enfolding warmth,
But a father's chilly reprimand.
("This old man, he played nine,
He played knick-knack on my spine.")
Down the stone alps to the hospital morgue,
I slid the steep steps of Lord Kelvin's scale,
In the faltering degrees of my dad's demise.
(Hey, Brother, let's piss in the snow--
His carrot nose, his buttons of coal...!
These glaciers were once his eyes.)
There on the gurney he froze me out--
A yellowing-purpled lump,
An effigy of cryogenic space
Fleering a fluorescent grimace,
An object that could not have been--
Not father who rode me piggyback,
Whose flushed and sweating cheek
Had ignited my fresh-kindled face--
Not candle wax... nor flesh... not even stone.
I've breathed air as fierce as fire,
When fingers froze to a rifle butt
And cracking ice was a sniper's shot,
In nights so numb they chilled all fear,
But when I kissed that inanimate brow,
I plummeted toward absolute zero
And discovered a loss that seemed to tear
The skin from my fast-stuck lips--
This was a cold too cold to bear.
If matter's mostly motion and motion is heat,
What stops bites the heart with icicle teeth.
You can't warm a father congealed to the core,
Forever a phantom glazed in the mind...
How love a thing that's no thing anymore?
Lord, let us forgive! Lord, let us be kind!
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