My
parents had one of their rows. What passed my head—
was
he reviling the stew and the pearl barley
or
was she treating him to her wit, whittling his pride
to
the cookhouse failure he couldn’t blanco clean
that
he was?—I don’t know, go back though I do.
It
was all shock to me, high accusation, noise,
ending
in a gesture that has stayed with me
like
a negative shadow in an atoll blast,
one
of life’s archetypes, one I return to.
He
threw down a framed snapshot, one of him
uniformed,
twinkling; screwed it into the floor.
The
crumpled battle-dress looked doggedly up,
its
pose still surviving on the torn sepia card,
the
ripped head still as perky in the past.
Ah,
I sneered, pommelled by sobs, I knew what that meant:
he
was erasing himself. Indeed, I knew—
condescending,
hating.
Twenty years later
my
wife starts off with, ‘The milk hasn’t come, and why?’
So
we slide into the chasm, biting and sniping
all
the way down to the slurry of despair,
while
our child hops in the shouts, juggling her tears
and
the incomprehensible she cannot hide from.
With
a chair I ram a door into splinters, damned,
to
destroy a house I anyway didn’t build.
Later
I mend the damage. But will it mend?
My
father and I are still not reconciled.
