It was never easy—my mother’s blond
German energy,
my father’s melancholy, black-Irish
demons,
abiding together in the same
small house
for fifty-five years; the endless, almost
wordless battle
over the bottle and her uncontrollable
cheerfulness.
The night my father died, through
held back tears,
my mother simply said,
I loved him.
Oh, who has words to speak of it,
to speak
of the winters of those days when
the lake
was always frozen, when
my father built
an ice shanty, spudded through
a foot of ice
to sit in the close heated shack
as if
in the darkness of a heart’s chamber,
to drop
a line through the hole, the red and white
bobber floating,
skim of ice already forming. I love
that my mother
loved this in him, his wanting to sink
a hook
into black water, the long chilled wait,
then to wrench
from the depths a gasp
of bright living,
and to let what could not be snared
be unsnared.
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