Poetry
Ideas for Writing About my Father
Or free verse with some carefully chosen repetition
Those funny wooden feet that wore his shoes
Sitting alone in his closet
Him–coming into my room only to stare out the window
trying to figure out what he was looking at
Wondering if I were invisible
The way he put on his pants–zipped them up, only to take them down again
to tuck in his shirt
how this puzzled me
The way he pushed down my eyelids to induce sleep
His silence
His little colored pills (blue and green)
His lake party at the cottage where he’d moved to and all the naked people
The woman lying in the bed where I usually slept, with her breast exposed and the overwhelming urge to cover it up
The smell of the joint he smoked with a hitchhiker (my first whiff)
His fights with Karen and feeling sea-sick on land
The “She can do anything she wants” when I refused to wear a raincoat and
how it made me feel sorry for my Grandmother
Taking longer walks than I ever wanted
How I wanted to strangle him every time he said “bit by bit, little by little”
Ramsey Lewis in his absence
His black friends
Dancing to soul music
The way he bragged about the clever things I said
My amazement that he knew anything about me especially that I had an extraordinary sense of smell
His silence
His laugh
The longing in his steel blue eyes
The way his lashes danced around them
Taking long drives down Kentucky dirt roads, hanging out the back of the station wagon on the way to some river-side fish joint
His compassion for delinquents and the down trodden
His belief that he could be of greater use to them
The irrational way I attempt to replace him
Seeing this absence in myself
How he could live in a place for two years and know everything about it
That he let me paint his living room walls
The girl-friend who left M&M’s by the bed and looked like Joan Baez
and all the ones he left
The bitterness that became my mother
The self I find difficult to recognize around him
Those funny wooden feet that wear his shoes
