January 2021
Bio Note: Quite a few of the poems I have written in the past several months have been born of
the conditions of the pandemic. When the social isolation was new, I took long solitary walks in the cold
Wisconsin spring. I grew to enjoy the way these walks prompted free-flowing thought.
The Winter Dad Turned Basement Archeologist
Dad strips the ancient drop-leaf table
splayed upside down.
I’m ten and the long dark seeped
into our narrow row house
all afternoon
like the way Dad never spoke much
which frightened me
but sometimes he sang
Dad brushes a chemical slop
across old paint the color of tuberculosis
or maybe just sin.
He sings It’s been a hard day’s night
and Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play
as he knifes the blistering goop aside.
Once Dad proclaimed that sin is inevitable
making that weekly Saturday drive to the church
inescapable.
Our lungs have become the atmosphere’s
confessional booth.
He and I lean over the table
and strain to decipher the hieroglyphics
of swirl and trail
in the revealed scripture of walnut wood.
The air of Wisconsin’s spring feels thin and sharp
like the fumes of solvent.
On solitary walks I scrape back the layers.
©2021 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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