I was a kid who hated his dad’s guts: shin-deep
in our front lawn, shouldering a push-mower
through a growth shrub-thick, I knew inside
his lung a tumor grapefruit-sized was sprouting
quicker than crabgrass, swifter than
fire in straw. I’d wished it would not rain
on us again and Dad was dead already,
his grave’s weeds long as bamboo and still growing,
like hair in a closed coffin.
Eight years later,
the day my parents met their only grandson,
I drove our Dodge in the last August heat
to the hardware store. There, my dad would buy
us three rotating fans for our cheap basement
apartment, whose few windows squinted into
a parking lot, My son, just six-weeks-old,
napped in his stuffy room. At a red light
we watched a boy cutting a dry, brown yard:
Dad said, “I never thought I’d see this day”;
The light changed, and our lives moved on for years.
Now Mother and Dad are both dead. But I’ve learned
the urgency Dad felt about our blood.
Ten years ago a sheriff called—I raced
against the clock and blackness blooming
in Alabama where I sped to save
my son from a second night in juvenile jail
and from spring break’s stupidity. Lost, I turned wrong
onto a bumpy gravel path that took me past
some trailer homes with plastic sheets
for doors and slits for windows, dark and open
as sockets whose eyes are gone. But they saw
my fear when I turned around. My headlights
flooded through their dead-end homes, like caskets
buried and blinding, wild woods. Soon after,
in an old red-brick building, I found him
at last, wide-eyed and wakened from his dreams
built on sand, miles and miles from Mobile’s sprawl
and the green lights we passed through on our long way home.