On the Absence of Trees

                                                                                                How could I blame you, dear father?

Your father leaving you when

you were just fifteen.

                                                                                                                                    I think about

                                                                                                                        this when pondering

                                                                                                                        my own adolescence:

                                                                                                                                    hours spent

                                                                                                                        waiting in waiting

                                                                                                            rooms just waiting to

                                                                                                                        be seen,

                                                                                                seen surrounded by

                                                                                                            outdated sports

                                                                                                            magazines with

                                                                                                illustrations of what

                                                                                    it takes to be a champion.

When I stop and think of grandad, all I recollect are nicotine-licked fingertips pressed against a

plastic Camel filter.

Tar scarred lungs drag out time into an anthracitic laughter.

Sometimes, I envision the enkindled mass of his half-lit cigarette drops and turns to dander on the collar of his sky-blue striped polo.

(I saw him wear it in a picture that you kept in a shoeshine box made of cedar on the top shelf of the closet in your home office…)

And sometimes, I listen to the western wind that sweeps across the prairie where I live and call to mind the only day he visited the house that I grew up in.

It was summer.

I was much younger.

Could such wind, now older, have swept that cinder off his shirt and sent it eastward to where his

ancestors once lived before some of them came to America in the late nineteenth century and settled

in the Ohio River valley?

Or would that orphaned ash combust as when a nebula begets a lutescent star or kills it?

Maybe nothing happens.                                                                                   I don’t know.

Because of this,                       (and pinned to the                                          Still, I hold onto the

I wonder what it                     portrait was a                                                  story that he told

must have been                      medal he earned for                                       me one early

like for him when                    serving during the                                           afternoon as we

as an infant his                        late spring of                                                   sat on the front

father left him                         1944.                                                               stoop below your

without food or                      Underneath the                                              bedroom window.

shelter. And how                    picture were a few                                          He said it was

he would come to                   loose papers that                                            because he had flat

find a home with                     mentioned factories in                                   feet, as I do, that he

families surnamed                  Pennsylvania and a                                         petitioned to be an

Steele and Roberts:                mother. First                                                   army doctor. Though

proper sounds,                        name: unknown. Last                                     years later when I

adopted, reek of                     name: sounding                                              retold the tale, you

something taken.                    foreign…)                                                        said it was not true.

And now when I look              And now I know                       And now each autumn

back at the shameful              we could not face                    evening, as the eastern wind

glance that I would                 what we could not                  bellows through the cedar

cast toward my worn              handle. I believe that it           deck behind my home,

sneakers as the medical         is for this reason that              I sit in a wrought iron

specialist examined                you told me of the                  chair and admire the razor

me for signs of puberty          persimmon tree and how       straight horizon. Neither

thought I was not born           it made for the finest              leaf nor branch interrupts

to be a man, and that             fairway woods and                 the monarch sky as it

I wished you would                 drivers. On my fifteenth         departs into the majesty

Comfort me after it was         birthday you handed              of twilight. Then I consider

over, I stop and think              me a rusted club made           the persimmon tree and

how your father’s                   from its resistant timbre.        how it often produces

past could cut                         A gift from your late father    fruit that’s too astringent

you in two pieces.                   now for me to carry.               to consume all on its own.

At the end of each winder, farmers set fire to the fields behind my house.

                                                                                                            (as the wind,

(the wind…)   

The first time I saw that dirt burn, I thought I heard a young boy screaming.

But I don’t know.

                                                                                    (maybe nothing

happened.)