1974 Almanac

The male nurse—the one we don’t trust.

{Unctuous means “well-coated.” Like a poisonous flower. Nerium oleander. Monkshead. Wolfbane in Dostoyevsky glasses.}    

Hellohello? Knockyknock?  

My father wanes.

My father’s posture while attended to in bed: (i) medical-experiment Al Pacino, (ii) broken candelabra.

Mickey Mantle, my father says from a corner of his mouth.      

The Commerce Comet, I say. {Population of Commerce, Oklahoma: 2,555.}

He seems to like to wash dishes there, he says.

Where ‘there’? I say.

My father looks upward without moving his head on his pillow.

{There there.}

We sit at a table by the coffee dispenser in the facility’s dinette {/yours the lost souls in ill-attended wards, John Berryman: “11 Addresses to the Lord”}.

My father juts his chin. Re-juts. Neck-craning. Communicating with birds. My father’s lips keep moving.  

He is passing through last doors.

         Feast of Cocked Hats.

         Holy Smell of Train Yard.

         Bread of Abandonment. Bread of Troubled Gums.

         Tent of Escorts.

My father stretches his mouth to invite his teeth to leave.

Skylab 4. The tallest building in Akron, Ohio. Broadway Joe.

God who is beyond time: O Renamer, rename him.

Dad, do you remember Bo Schembechler? I ask him.   

Oh sure, he says like a man I meet on a bridge, oh sure.

And I am never the same son after that.