lines
photograph by james cater, 2019
then,
my father,
six foot two,
shoulders back
and proud,
with blazing hair
of orange gold
and hands
like obliterators.
he takes me
in those quiet hours
not far, too far
from sleep.
crosses me
across his chest
and sings me
through the morning
drive, the streets
dark blue
and empty.
and at the tracks,
the station
humming,
he tells me
of those men
that drive
those dirty trains
across this dry
flat country.
as the steam
comes rushing up,
swallowed by
a starlit sky,
and the rails
do their shrieking,
he lifts me up
like holy cargo
up up!
into the cabin.
there
those men
of lore
at their gears,
rattle off
with tales
of towns where
water runs like blood,
and the ladies
yes! they’ll take
to bed
when this
ironclad centipede
settles in the west.
and in the
perspex horizon,
with the powerlines
like visages
of founding fathers,
i watch my father
with his arms of light
dancing
subtly
jerkily
angrily.
the first
lines
of sunlight
hit the railway
lines
and the dull
shimmer
of the
rails
become
forces
immutable.
this body moving forward.
these men
they carry on
through tired
work,
carry on
and on
with their sad
little tales
of the uselessness
of women
of the futility
of youth
of the idiocy
of dreams
of the madness
of age.
after,
my father dressed
in soot and grit
looks up at me from
blue metal earth,
helps me defy gravity—
feet dancing through the sky.
my body then
pulled close to him
a young fault-line
across his chest
he says
in the good
old days
women were
like packhorses,
used to shovel the shit.
ah, the good old days.
they sigh.
when men were really men.
their skin
their skin
like glass with sweat.
my mouth
a fine line
across my face.
some years
later
when girls
have become
so real
to me,
their shapes
glorious
stitch lines
in the fabric
of all else,
he tells me
(his head growing bald now)
at the kitchen table
many times
like it is the first time
and the last time
every. single. time.
women are like horses,
always getting in
the way.
his jokes
a boy as big as a man
are bones of meat
the flies
circling
diving
falling
rising up—
the dull
immutable
in their million
beaded eyes.
at twenty-eight
these women
will no longer
have me
and the lines i use
like trench-lines
are the lines
that my father
left me.
and as
i talk
of broken hearts
of the bitterness
of being
he says,
son,
women are like
riding horses.
if you fall off one
get on another
and soon
i’ll guarantee ya
you’ll forget about the first.
and i sit
there thinking,
all twenty-eight
of barren nothing,
in this town
where I always end up,
what’s with
this old man
and the bloody horses?
so i
ask my mother,
secret keeper,
about his
his equine obsession.
but my mother,
fine strings
across her face,
she doesn’t know,
besides to say
he used to waste
his pennies
on the ponies
always begging
for the big
buck bux
and never
winnin’ nothin’.
everyday,
my mother says,
he was there,
his tickets
dancing
subtly
jerkily
angrily.
like a sullen horse
wringing out its mane.
and so now,
my father,
five foot eleven,
stooped,
that golden hair,
gone white and grey,
and thin
so thin
a deforestation
revealing
the lines
across his scalp.
those lines,
almost mutable,
dulled somewhat
by the quiet
question of age,
like fault lines
like trench lines
like track lines
like stitch lines
like power lines
like bloodlines
like, almost,
a lifeline
between us.
father,
understand,
the glue factory
is coming.
