Reconciliation

(for my father, now I am his age,
as he was then, and weighed down
Now and again,
By my mortality and inexplicable sudden
sadness)

their was no reconciliation for me as
my father's tears flowed
like flooded gutters under a driving rain,
the down spout clogged with an old squirrel's nest.
who knew what debris and decay lurked in his heart
that backed up the bitter waters of grief .

he walked that black dog, he did,
round the block a few times and again,
one hand clinging to a cigarette,
the other deep in the pocket of his khaki shorts.
loose change, a gum wrapper, a Zippo.
but who knew what was really in there
with the lint and loose threads
and his plump warm hand.

one remembers a round bland face
suddenly split with a smile,
an unexpected joke shared only
with the boys...
"what do you call a...."
and in his brain was there a chaotic stew
of middle age, depression,
foreboding?
did mortality rear its unhandsome face
to leer at him in his darkest moments?

in the midst of his sadness,
islands of peace, normalcy.
a graduation, a baptism, a sports banquet,
when the world made more sense
and his heart beat hopeful tattoos
in his chest.

we did not know what was in there,
behind the tears and the sudden weeping.
we did not know what his clinging hands sought,
pale as they were
as they held us to his scratchy cheek,
as he cried for a reason we
who were so naive
could not fathom his pain
even now, thirty years on