Detritus

My father was a hard man. I cannot say I knew his heart in any way.

Expressing himself was not a gift he claimed or exhibited, save for anger, blaring like a warhorn.

And anything could make him angry.

It was not a fun way to grow up, to learn what it takes to be a man, when that kind of person is your example. I know this now, decades later, sorting through that detritus to find meaning in my own life.

I wonder what it was like for him as a boy, how his brothers treated him, what he learned from his own sire – the only man I ever knew to make my father cry.

I saw that with my own eyes, one of my earliest memories: bad news sifting through the house like an ancient fog, and my father on the couch weeping like a child.

I was a baby myself, I think, but I wanted to crawl up into his lap and comfort him. Only now do I remember that, this poem clearing the memory like a hand wiping dirty glass, a dusty mirror revealing an old secret.

A part of me creates a reasoned story telling how that moment made him the bully I knew, broken by his own father slipping away into the eternal night, never to return. But the reality is much more basic.

My father was a bully because he was terrified of the world. He would nurse that terror in beer and neglect, then release it in rage and ridicule, menacing and roaring in a tongue I could not understand.

This poem reminds me I find comfort in the smell of shoe leather, darkness, because at its worst, I would end up on the floor of a closet, hands over my ears, softly singing nonsense songs to drown out the tumult.

Wondering what I had done to spark the argument this time, how I had lit the powder keg, taking that blame onto myself. A little soldier in a war not of my making, acting the martyr in a story not of my writing.