The Folded Heart

The Lights

The Lights Outside my father's house I wait for him to flip the power on and for the string of lights we've strung over the boxwood and pyracantha hedge to glow and flicker in the dark waxy green of their leaves. We test the dead ones that lie like buds unbloomed or bring alive the quiet ones that need a twist or tap, and then arrange the strand so all the bulbs point downward. When I feed the length to him, his hands stretch high above his head to measure out the intervals for staples along the eaves. I plant my foot for ballast on the ladder's lowest rung and wait for him to drive the staples in. Across from him and through the lattice of a climbing rose, I see, halfetched , half-fossilized against the brick, the stubborn ivy feet that nothing could dissolve, a pattern radiating like a comer of a galaxy, random though composed of scars, traces of pediments that held the vines of greater mass, arteries and veins 41 42 that fed the leaves and made the circuits vital, electrified with green, and then returning to the ladder, my father's shifting weight, the insulated staples that lie white and tangled in the box beneath a window of cellophane, I see the climbing rose, the lower stalks thick and rigid with the violence of thoms, and then my father holding up a staple, like a wiry tooth, before he sets it carefully over the twisted strand, pressing hard on its head with his thumb, until the blood drains white beneath his skin. ...