A bad eye and flat feet like mine
always kept him home. He’d try
again, but the war in Europe,
the war in North Africa, the war
in the Pacific didn’t want him.

For fifty years I knew that eye,
its milky look of no surprise,
his stiff-legged gait, but never
such longing, such capacity for
passion beyond company quotas—

until between their deaths my mother
told her stories: all the other boys
leaving for the service, the rationing
of coffee, sugar, meat, and gasoline,

the bond-raising big bands in Cleveland’s
glitzy ballrooms, the occasional V-mail
from her brother bivouacked in Belgium,
the telegram that said he was dead.

Then just a modest wedding—It was
wartime, you know—a few days off
from the aircraft factory for the brief
honeymoon at Niagara, and back to

eighty-hour work weeks, overnight trains
to the plant in St. Louis, the beginning
of my father’s industrious silence.

My father had entered a realm
I would never know. Although
slumped in a chair
in that common room
at the end of a dimly lit corridor—
well beyond the other withered bodies,
their wheel chairs lining
the bumpered walls, their
attendants glib, shouting directives—
my father sat small
like a seer, his web-thin hair
roostered, whiskers grizzling
his business chin.  He was decoding
some constellation located vaguely
above the bulletin board announcing
Thursday Bingo, muttering,
raising his wasted arms as if in warning
the world was about to end.

Which it was—and it shuddered
shock waves through my throat,
the distance between us
collapsing like a telescope.
My mother, seated as calmly
as if my life would go on,
looked at me as if I were signaling
it wouldn’t, and before he would die
two days later, my father narrated ancient
sales trips—Gary, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne—
then turned only to my wife and ended,
“What do you think about all this?”

When I was a teen he seemed mainly to care
about the length of my hair, and in all
wrote me two letters, both advising
about life insurance. But now
my speech shivered, my chest
compressed the universe
of my heart, and I didn’t know
what to do with my hands.