The Father I Lost

Memories felt after so long repressed Now burn like a fire inside of my chest They flow now as ink from the tip of my tongue For the father I lost when I was too young These memories loosed like the breach of a dam They spill and wash over everything that I am They are the reservoir of all the tears that I hid So my mother didn’t carry any more than she did They’ve chiseled me out like a river through stone Making spaces within me that may yet be unknown Those waters have shaped me into who I’ve become A boy who’d be better than whom he came from. I’d be nothing like you; I swore that I wouldn’t I’d make the right choices that somehow you couldn’t The fact that I thought this way still makes me sad For I sometimes remember you as a pretty good dad Of laughter and care I have vague recollection There even are thoughts that I hold with affection Like when you brought me hunting to your special blind And were patient with me as I talked the whole time We caught worms for fishing, played catch with a ball You taught me to build things; all of these I recall You made the memories that good parents do So why can’t that be how I remember you? But sadly, the memory I cannot forget Is of you alone with a beer and cigarette Sitting on the porch staring off into space With an unreadable look on your face The kind that no childish smile could soften It’s only still clear because I saw it so often As if after looking too long at a light A harsh afterimage though you’re gone from my sight I see the worst things of the man that you were Cast in sharp relief while the good is a blur And there will be no future to recast that lens For the father I lost cannot give a defense. There’ll be no tomorrow for starting anew You’ll get no chance to change how I remember you, To repair your image or the way that I think, To explain the fresh flowers hidden under the sink Or the one drunken night that you slept off in jail Or any faults I remember with vivid detail. You can’t apologize for losing your temper Or for any other petty wrongs I remember You can’t for you’re gone; you have lost any hope Snuffed like the cigarettes that you once used to smoke And the truth that perhaps I have too long denied Is that mostly I lost you before ever you died. Even when you were home you were often not there Insubstantial, like you were the smoke in the air But now the beer cans are empty, the ashes are black, And the time that is lost we will never get back I’ll never have answers to the questions I kept And that is the truth I can finally accept I’ll never know reasons for the choices you made And that bothers me less with each passing decade So I won’t make excuses or guess at the why For to pretend that I know them at all is a lie In the end I accept you just for who you are The father I lost to a drink in a bar. PS Added: 8.22.18 Written: 12.4.15