My father bought a coat, black with wisps of silver thread. 
He wore it in winter with a Russian hat perched on his head. 
All night I dreamed of cabbages, hacked to pieces in the warm kitchen. 
Carrots on the cutting board, a large cup of water and a yellow door. 
My father worked somewhere downtown. 
We ate breakfast, chewed our rolls, sipped coffee as it cooled. 
What a long walk we had to the subway, 
then all the way to the river and out to the rail yard, 
where used bookstalls spilled their wares 
and scrawny cats slunk around twisted trees. 
We read about winter in New England, pages and pages of snow. 
We read about sweaters and skis. 
The wind rippled my hair, but my father sat on the ground, 
his face turned to stone. 
We read about wars until the rain drove us inside, 
where we looked around for a place to eat, our hands bitten and raw. 
My father told me about pirates, how differently they lived 
from the pioneers, how they spent most of their lives at sea, 
cold and hungry, with little to sing about as empire bore down like a giant stone.
                        

My father told me a story about a man with a chrysanthemum. 
His son had asked for one, maybe for a school project 
or as a perfect symbol for something quite lovely and out of reach, 
but the man couldn’t spell the word, so he offered a rose. 
Suddenly the boy saw his father as someone broken by the world. 
For days, the two of them wandered through a dry land. 
The boy spoke only in rhyme, the father answered 
in a language neither understood. 
By the time I was ready for sleep, my father had returned with a plate 
on which he placed a chocolate, a cookie, and a slice of ham.
I wanted an apple, so I turned away to the wall 
while he sang an aria, probably Einsam in Truben Tagen from Lohengrin.
That’s the way we made peace, the two of us, over apples and chocolate and songs.