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
Copyright © Jesse Rowe | Year Posted 2018
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