Rural Mississippi woods, country road, parents’ retirement
acre
Thanksgiving in Trumpland
Talking internal temperature of turkeys over one-eighty
Timing two in the morning father shuffling through drawers for a
meat thermometer
Three couples and me in the house
My gen-x body attempting sleep on an air mattress slid in a
mezzanine attic loft
Parent bears in master, aunt and husband in guest one, older
brother's family out in the trailer
Millennial brother and wife in upstairs guest two
Ask me at eleven p.m. if I want a beer after lights out, elders
long asleep
Reading my kindle-light to a Chris Hedges’ book, “Empire of
Illusion”
Newlyweds stay up to one a.m. streaking light out their door,
chatting suds
Stay with the word tide solo rustling my cracked car accident spinal
disk
Boomer father in an hour testing meat heat for Turkey Day
Roll out aluminum foil, crinkle, crinkle
Five a.m. aunt’s husband up with my dad talking retirement
payouts
Lump sum or monthly payment, windows how it is and ain’t no more
How-to on payroll tax fraud; little lies, my conscience is ok; so it's not wrong
One of the lucky few with a pension
Durkheim, guys he’s worked with since nineteen: workplace family
Live life in the money, grandkids, American dream whole oral bit
Aunt woke up and started checking plasma screen prices on her
iPhone
For Black Friday, Cyber Monday perfect replacement television
She got toe-jam football, she shoot coca cola…
Millennials still sleeping 8:20 am
Old bucks hustling for coffee and grinds
Pajama morning, can you feel the disease
Aunt’s taking a Zyrtec for allergies
Got a Christmas sweater and a laminated Thanksgiving prayer for
Jesus to read
People eating cake for breakfast with John Lennon playing on the
iHome
Father shows me a video of
Sean Rowe “To Leave Something Behind” on his iPhone
Says it makes him cry; I listen to it in an alcove over the
relative bustle
“When the machine has taken the soul of a man”
My maternal grandfather and his senior friends arrive under the crucifix above the door
One with a CNN cap my father asks him if he wants a replacement
I help Pa Pa piss a few drops from a stubborn prostate
Elastic band pants and joke to still laugh at our farts
Staring out glass to a rose bush harboring a honey bee
Last to the food line: dry unfrozen venison my dad killed in 2016
The cranberry sauce tastes
like Play-Doh
Last seat is next to my father and the geriatric set
Silence broken between five post-Medicare citizens and me
Talk about taking my former Catholic high school principal to
dinner
Mention the time the priest got drunk and he had to still say
the magic words
My father switched to the public school his senior year to do a
split schedule work program
Afternoon tractor ride for the disciples to chainsaw a dead log into
firewood
Son put it perpendicular, do you know what I mean? No.
Fire circle pit geometric shapes for airflow and tinder
Blaze way of the ancient to sit under the stars and make up
stories
About the ceiling paint, twinkle UFO’s and peach moonshine
Powers whiskey and standing in cold Mississippi night
Rascal tales and fishing shorelines receding as hair gone
How New Orleans is sinking and no chance
Father says communism was not Leftists;
Civil War was over states’ rights, says Libertard and looks straight at me
I wish it was the whiskey or if he knew it was Lao Tzu
"He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not
know."
I try to keep my mouth shut; fail, say too much.
Tribal flames and winter
End up hugging my brothers
Thinking about what it means to give up, persistence
My father’s woods, yoga mat in the morning
Breaking in the sunlight, flying crow pose warming
Thinking about secrets, the keyboard to come home to
The empty passenger seat road trips
Tyler Durden says “You are not your job.
You are not your fuckin’ khakis.
You’re the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world.”
Search for a five-dollar bill to give the Causeway toll booth
single-serve friend
My father was talking about the government
Shouldn’t be able to enter your home without a warrant
I mention my book and Nixon in 1978, Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act
Pull up chapter three on my laptop; offer; turns his head away for one more cup of coffee
My father asked if I wanted to join the peeps in archery
practice
After fawning over his custom woodwork bows for twenty minutes
Closes door
I tell my mother I feel like my father is comfortable in his
circle
Does not want to grow, I don’t expect him to, I just love him in his
circle
She says that is about right; I asked her if my father talked to
her
About what happened out by the fire; she says no
First rule of man club is you don’t talk about emotions you have
in man club
This morning I put my yoga mat in a carpet of pine needles under
rows of loblolly pines
I saw a turkey buzzard fly solo from east to west
I thought to myself; I think about this every day
Somehow it creeps in, like keeping an eye on a locomotive
Just in case I forget the schedule and I am accidently playing
hobo poker on the tracks
"I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive."
The night before Thanksgiving
I had a moment with my parents on their sofa with a DVD of End
of Tour I brought
I told them, “I’d like to watch this movie with you
sometime.
I think it would help you understand me more.”
My father just stared at a reality show Forged in Fire about
knife-making on the History Channel
My father says karma is real
I think of my younger brother’s friend I talked with at a punk
show
Shot to death on his sofa in his living room by an intruder
My older brother says John Lennon was a fake and full of shit
The morning after Thanksgiving
My older brother shows my dad an iPhone video about a bear
banging his testicles on a rope
My father is entranced, laughs his ass off rolling on the
kitchen table
The day I left standing out by the archery range
I went to tell my father goodbye and said
“I think how you were unjustifiably the shit-kid growing up, sister
father’s’ angel, brother mother’s
Grandpa was an outdoorsman and you took the one thing you bonded with him and built this.
If he were alive, “He would say,
my God son look at this place. I am so proud of you. I grew up in a one room
shack at the dead end of a swamp road. You have a wife and three sons who love you.”
I told my dad, “I don’t give a fuck about the politics. We are
not all different. You are my father I love you I will always love you. I know
you don’t understand me or why I have to write or be the way I am. When you got
up at five a.m. to work out the union hall to go wherever they sent you when I
was two or did an A.C. system change out before dawn and took the call for a
second in the afternoon while laying on the floor with Charley Horses in your
legs. I got your persistence. I am never going to give up. Life hits you in the face. You be a man. You keep standing. You keep going. I learned that from you.” We hugged. I drove home alone.
“When my son is a man he’ll know what I meant. I was just trying
to leave something behind.”
Maybe all men who go out in the woods are chasing their father.
Sean Rowe
Instant Karma Bear
End of Tour "I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive."
