North Alabama School for the Lost and Found
I found my father hunched at the desk paying the mortgage.
I found him watching me in bed in the room remortgaged
for another thirty years of summer light shining through the trees,
his hand held high on the door frame cut from the wood of a tree.
I found him in his bellowing voice calling me from the yard,
though I stayed where I was, behind a tree in another yard
until the coast was clear, last hint of daylight, last breath of wind,
the silver maples above me filling their sails with the winds.
I thought I could run like the wind.
As night came on, I knew I could outrun him.
I can’t see him as I once did. Moonlight brushes my shoulder,
and I call my oldest son inside who stands now to my shoulders.
The sky is darker, the streets empty, and these trees
are small doors into other lives in other yards with other trees
and older songs I didn’t know I would remember,
like an arm around my neck, the exact scent of his skin.
pea river journal 
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