My Father'S Whistle

54 the minnesota review Len Roberts My Father's Whistle (for Gerald Stern) One night as I lay on the green hill watching the first gray light of night cover the city, I heard your whistle calling me home, that low, cathedral music swimming from your throat. I did not go in. Instead, I watched hundreds of ants divide the bread, I listened to their thin legs scratch the earth. I let them all live and did not go home for more than twenty years, and when I did, I saw the scentless chrysanthemums stained on the wall, the linoleum cracking, the pear tree I'd climbed split by lightning; I could hear, I could hear, as though my ears had popped coming down the hill, how you murmured in bed, how her voice would twist as she shouted, the soft sound of the door as you stepped out to Boney's Bar. And the green cakes of ice cracking, the coming of night as we shot marbles in the alley, dirt clouds rising as we walked, the sound of the owl breaking in just as you disappeared through the white pickets, the climbing yellow rose, your heart. ...