Joining Hands Across Time
First night in his final place
My dad called me weeping
“Please Bobby bring me home.”
His skin like ice cream
Melting on handle bars
Plopped in his wheelchair
Square
In the center cone of an empty room
Plaster cracked
A single nail
Where a clock once hung like a moon
He said, “They won’t tell me what time it is.
I don’t know what time it is.”
I hung his hat on that abandoned fish hook
Bent to his knees
Took off his shoes and massaged his feet
Re-storing the bait of heat to his bones.
“It’s nearly midnight Dad.”
The best time to sit beside a lake
With a fire flirting on the lunar water
And Aristotle fishing with balled up bread.
My Dad, once a boy floating famously on his back
Away on Lake Gogebic
In an afternoon polished by copper miners
To now, a lifetime later of sailing a Butterfly boat
Through two-footers on Torch Lake
His worn hands joined with his boy’s creamy hands
To a rope slipped through a pulley
Tightening the sail against the northern wind
Creating more speed and angling the boat almost to its side
Flattened to the lake
Our bodies standing up
Face to face
To the white sheet pulled and taut
Over the nose and chin of the choppy waves.
Later that night and forever more
My cell phone chimes like a clock
Every quarter hour
Shaking on my nightstand
From Dad’s new land line.
Copyright © Robert Trezise Jr. | Year Posted 2020
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