Daddy, Then
By Chantale Reve
Copyright © 2010-2011 Chantale Reve
Smashwords Edition
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Wasn't it a blink ago to yesterday
That your brawny hand eclipsed mine,
When you stretched ten feet into cloudless sky,
My tiny footsteps lagging miles behind?
And wasn't it just yesterday,
My toes pranced ballerina-style,
A balance beam made of your back,
Your moustache curved into your smile?
Forty-plus, mangled years recalled,
I used to tape on the bathroom do’
A crooked “$3 Shampoo” crayon sign,
Before purposefully tangling your coily ’fro.
Crying, I reminisce how your suds-stung eyes
Forgave as I yanked and wet-braided your hair –
“Ultra Sheening” the beige grids in your ’gator scalp –
Admonishing you for squirming in my salon chair.
Funny how I used to sing your name, “Daddy,” then,
Dreamed of fish fry, firefly, Ferris wheel-high tomorrows,
Of your face flushing from hot-mustard-doused “swammp-fied” rice,
Of clinging to arms built to shelter me from unwished sorrows.
Can you hear my infectious giggles now
Echoing off harlequin pattern bathroom tiles,
Thawing your frosty, long-shuttered heart
While mine shatters to slivers across the miles?
Why did you get that flesh mole zapped,
The one I never failed to rake across
With that black, hard-rubber comb?
Oh, how much your pain has cost!
A lifetime later, dyeing over parsed gray hairs,
I’m chronically hoarse from vociferous silence.
An aging rift remains undefined unlike muscular arms
Catching your horse shit from reluctant distance.
Forty-odd years have come to this:
An impasse due to incapacity to accept
That love is a shape-shifting entity,
That it’s a choice to be prematurely bereft.
You hide, I seek, the man who was my daddy, then.
Why must our hearts collide and capsize?
How to drain the ocean that widens our void?
How to quell the torture that I inherited your eyes?
~ ~ ~
Like a kite beckoned by a breeze
Whistling along a stretch of sky,
Your love lifted –
No, it drifted far away from me,
So when you’re fishing out at sea,
Hissing and pissing with your buddies
About the one that got away,
See me catch a wave,
And wave goodbye.