How to Build a Dad Out of Bricks
A riddle in which were they heavy or were they bright
My father was a bag of bricks
my mother carried around,
stone enough for foundations
but stubbornly refusing
to become a building.
My father was a right pallet of bricks
of the opinion that buildings
were corrupt, ugly, and foolish—
so better make a ring of stone
for a cookfire, better make a circle
at the lakeshore for the fish
we caught, out all night
by flashlight with the hooks
catching in our arms.
My mother was heavy, too,
with sleep, forgetting to drink
water, remembering to drink
too much to forget and sleep—
the twin fish of her moods
tugging against herself,
and she was light, too, a kite torn
needing a third cord
to ground her, who found
my father, lovely bricks,
to hold her down.
My mother tied me, too,
for flotation, to a story
she’d anchored at the heavypoint—
possible suitor, lost career—
her vessel backwards
through hardship toward
a wider story or wilder fruit
than the fallow years: she would
unharvest me, unhusband
into a more musical life, no
baby floating in the front-row
cloud of smoke at a truckstop cafe.
They were heavy, here,
at the balancepoint—still possible—
between tragedy to come and the past;
they might yet rescue themselves and each other.
They were radiant, too, lit from within
the binary gravity they made,
the tight dance of interlocking pulses—look:
my mother is here, relishing
my father in a tuxedo, cooler than omar sharif,
descending the grand stairway,
of the mafia restaurant where they both work—
his every step lighter than her hopes
as she walks, heavy with worry, up,
and she is then more girl than I am now
or perhaps have ever been.
She has not seen him in three days,
not since confessing what she’s survived,
and he asks, as she collects her last paycheck,
Are you going to be home tonight?
and she says–all she can say–is:
Yes.
Fathers Named by Sons
My father talked so often about how glad he was not to have a son that it became clear how badly he wanted one who would take from him his given name and've given him another one, baptized him as the father of the son so named by the father, Abu ibni, and in this way my father could become a self-named man. What a son I became first-born, j-turn on a dirt farm road, tall girl, gun-comfortable, I threw my body over gaps to bridge a divide that would not die. And my father kept his name-- the one his father gave him-- on paper only: 'Abd, a servant to no one, and gave himself to everyone as Hadi, the peaceful.