I should have learned something from the years
watching my father: architect, carpenter,
inventor -- master of countless occupations.
When I was ten I watched him construct a device
for storing nuts, bolts, screws and nails --
made of pine and old baby food jars.
I was thirteen when I watched him
install the new furnace I couldn’t help carry;
seventeen when he built the deck
with a hired kid to nail down the floor boards.
I watched my father build and re-build the house
where my three sisters and his two brothers
grew up, raising dormers, erecting walls --
whatever it took. I was apprenticed at birth,
Play-School tool box at the hospital,
all plastic: toy hammer, toy wrench, toy driver.
When I was five I used to measure my hands
to his, raise one in the air as if testifying,
my tiny fingers stretching, lost in his palm,
my skin pink and raw against his rough as sand paper.
I remember being drafted from the corner
from playing with friends or sitting alone
whenever he needed me to hold a board
as he worked the skill saw, or to hold one end
of a chalk line taut so he could snap it down
to make a perfect line, blue clouds rising off the board.
With my father’s patient voice I tried to drown
the sounds of barking dogs, airplanes humming;
creeping visions I tried to shake -- shapes I saw
in the sawdust landscaping the garage floor
like a desert, or the places rain on the window
would take me -- narrowing my eyes to his hands,
focusing to find that enthusiasm I must have
before the disappointment would fill his eyes,
and he would send me away.
Now from my old bedroom I watch him in the yard,
his hands clasped lightly around a rake
he works the yard slowly, methodically combing
the thinning, dying grass of rotting leaves, his ungloved
hands callused and thick with the knowledge
of work. I watch my father bending
to fill plastic bags with sticks and dead leaves,
somehow magnified, somehow simplified,
he moves with an old man’s grace and dignity.
His eyes are blue like mine, cast into his work,
or cast somewhere beyond perhaps.
His big hands have always been before me,
ordering the universe, fixing the broken parts,
scraping off the excess like too much paint.