Jagged with Love

Christmas, 2000

CHrISTmas, 2000 My father has a pocket full of things even he does not know. In the morning with his cup, snow outside the window and his church across the way, the early hours have called him man at their fIrst birr oflight, sent from the sun with a name. This Christmas, nothing is wrong: my brother has not dyed his hair, my sister passed her boards, I am not in love with a black man. This Christmas I notice how my uncles close him out of conversation like a musty room, effectually sending him to the couch with Uncle Jim, who is on his way to, if not already, drunk, and who is most interesting ofthem all, watching football from inside a featherless mind. My uncles say, Alfalfa? Hqyseed? On the sides of his eyes, my father's skin droops into Greek letters. This is the yearI should have guessed even then, in the quick clasp of holiday-my father will call forth my sympathy, small, consistent buckets carried in from the shore of adolescence, where he banned me, where I crawled in the foam of his crashedvoice, his pulling fury. We do not, probably we will never, talk about the day I found his hands around my throat, not squeezing-not squeezing at all-but holding, perhaps for the sake ofwhat he did not know how to wield, perhaps in the sheer, ensconced loss of control, his cloak ofred-white-&-blue so soiled and so electrifying. Though I do not know it yet, this is the year I will cry for my father in a wet stratagem: knowledge, distance, despair. At fIrst this is despite myself, my fear of him unable to sour into a wholesome hate, easing instead into an uncertainty, a loss spilling over, his own wounds wounding me: in the caverns of his mouth they say, I do not know if".!Yfather loved me; in his bones, the venom of circumstance; in everything, everything, Vietnam. This is how it began, my body on the floor, reckless, yelling out his terrible, forgiven name to God. No-this is how it began: there, on the couch with Jim, head thrown back, lips slightly open, fallen asleep, his face stepped back from its sturdy pulpit. The bad dream he is havingfurrows his skin, tells how his old, rapacious core is susceptible to horror and rush, the helplessness of a dream, the dark temper, perhaps, turned on him, heavying his heavy pocket. My father stopped being strong. This is the year I learn that fear runs, in fact, on legs of love, but it will be months before I breathe a prayer to topple its velocity. It is only Christmas, and we have gathered in one room, the periodicity of gifts packing us tight to each other's bodies, laughing, coughing. Families-these units of purpose, cannot, even when there is nothing else, learn the language of stillness. My father is awake, picking something from his ear. I have my hands in my pockets, the surest place for my fingers. Grandmother and the Christmas tree sit in opposite corners ofthe enlivened room, keeping the world so coolly in a kind of balance. Here is what we are, here is what we wish to be: perched inside the ruby ornament, given to the sinking of meringue, trusting as the towhee at the feeder each carefully pecked winter morning. ...