People And Places

People And Places

Father

Twice he took me in his hands and shook

me like a sheaf of wheat, the way a dog shakes

a snake, as if he meant to knock out my tongue

and grind it under his heel right there

on the kitchen floor.  I never remembered

what he said or the warnings he gave; she

always told me afterwards, when he

had left and I had stopped my crying.  I

was eleven that year and for seven more years

I watched his friends laughing and him

with his great hands rising and falling

with every laugh, smashing down on his knees

and making the noise of a tree when it cracks

in winter.  Together they drank chokecherry

wine and talked of dead friends and the

old times when they were young, and because

I never thought of getting old, their

youth was the first I knew of dying.

Sunday before church he would trim

his fingernails with the hunting knife

his East German cousins had sent, the same

knife he used for castrating pigs and

skinning deer: things that had nothing

to do with Sunday.  Communion once

a month, a shave every third day, a

good chew of snuff, these were the things

that helped a man to stand in the sun for

eight hours a day, to sweat through each

cold hail storm without a word, to freeze

fingers and feet to cut winter wood, to do

the work that bent his back a little more

each day toward the ground.

Last Christmas, for the first time, he

gave presents, unwrapped and bought

with pension money.  He drinks mostly coffee

now, sleeping late and shaving everyday.

Even the hands have changed: white, soft,

unused hands.  Still he seems content

to be this old, to be sleeping in the middle

of the afternoon with his mouth wide open as if there

is no further need for secrets, as if he is

no longer afraid to call his children fools

for finding different answers, different lives.

By

Dale Zieroth (1946-Present)

Born in Neepawa