Dad’s Visit, October 2013

Scribbled pages found after the funeral, a notebook of therapy
in action—Paying the taxes, Charlie finding a job, Katie losing

teeth, tires falling from the car. Getting lost. Across Fourteenth Street,
food cart steam oozed into exhaust. I snaked three paces ahead

while your tennis shoes puppeted clogs, stuck in the shadows. We shunned
the half-propped sidewalk cellar doors, you toeing line, carrying

the tail of our private parade. We wove without slowing, down Seventh Avenue
past the hardware stores, the smoke breaks, the paper stand

on Christopher Street. Down, further, down, skirting curbs and crowds—I led, you
trusted, as long as our cradled space kept the inches, to Canal Street’s awnings,

scalloped, snapped above stores, bold blocked Foam Rubber Cut to Size, souvenirs
below, fire escapes above, the rippling pulse of bodies, bicycles, buses

to the checkered, five-stories with red and white bricks, bright flashing—
Pearl Paint. How else to prove I wasn’t lost to the decades in the city alone?

And through sweat and a gulp, you followed again up the double flights, our stomps
echoing in cinder walls, their beat fading into the world’s largest art supply store.

During that climb, during that rhythm, we did not imagine a clerk pulling grate,
shaking charcoal dust from its links, those tired from eighty years of rattling, toward a kiss

of lock to sidewalk, for a final time. By April, the paint pots were emptied. Mineral
spirits splashed to curb. All tossed. And me left to scribble out the grooves and ghosts.