“Daddy, can you help me,” her 7-year-old voice
calls from the shower. “I can’t open
the conditioner.” I put my cup of coffee
on the kitchen island where the morning
light lays itself down after slanting
through the front windows, an easy
blessing. Into the thick air
of the warm bathroom. She hands me the bottle
around the curtain’s corner,
the smile in her voice. “Thanks, Dad!” she chirps,
as I pop it open and place some
in the wet and wrinkled palm
of her upturned hand.
Outside, it looks like winter: frost glazes the fallen
leaves, Leslie is still gone, and my uncle
has had a stroke. My dad sends updates to us,
the ways my uncle’s body returns to him
in slow increments, like a baby learning
all the tasks of life. In some ways he is being
born all over again.
“Daddy, can you help me,” her 7-year-old voice
calls from the hall. “My socks are inside
out.” I stand up from the computer where
my work day has already begun and go into the hall,
noticing the small, wet footprints on the faux-wood
floor. I show her how to reach inside, turning everything
back on itself.
Our neighbor told me
yesterday, as we stood holding rakes in the dying
light, that his wife has cancer and a handful
of years with which to fashion
a suitable ending. “It’s life,” he said, after
I offered my flimsy condolences. “When the door
opens, I’ll walk through it.”
“These leaves don’t stop falling,” I said later on,
commiserating with him about what feels like
a never-ending task. But he, perhaps as one who
has looked into the eyes of the The End, only
smiled, glanced down at the golden ground,
and then said, looking up at me,
a twinkle in his eye,
“Sure is beautiful though, isn’t it?”
“Daddy, can you help me,” her 7-year-old voice
calls from the front door. “I can’t reach
my coat on the hook.” And so I walk through years
of memory and worry and the present gift of
this here and now, reach up to places
that will soon be within her own grasp,
take down her pink coat with the fur-lined hood,
and help her into something that is
already too small.
Through the window I watch them walk away,
out the lane to the bus—my smallest
daughter and son, my wife—the sun straining
to rise above the tallest trees, and that light
—that light!—
still slanting through every pane.
A beautiful reminder in this season of Thanks and sorrow.
The poetry of ache...