I swept, the day after my father died,<\/p>\n
a thousand pounds of scrap\u2014plates, rods, wires, gears\u2014
\nwith an industrial broom three feet wide.
\nI didn\u2019t have the energy for tears.<\/p>\n
I hurled reams of 90lb cover stock,
\nrolls of blank newsprint, corrugated cardboard,
\nstacks of die-cut boxes packed in a shipping box
\nnever delivered to a customer who never paid.<\/p>\n
I dumped his confession from drawers of lead type
\non the concrete floor of the loading dock
\nand shoveled it off into the bin below.<\/p>\n
I poured a hundred gallons of wasted ink,
\nblending indigo, emerald, pink, gold and black
\ninto this grey biography of his adulterous heart.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Come look at the overcast sky with me.<\/p>\n
Without the Sun, the grey, amorphous clouds
\nbuckle like an abandoned farmhouse ceiling\u00ad,
\nyawing and sagged, barely clearing six feet,
\nhouseflies suspended in cobwebs for years
\nwithout a broom to brush them from the corners
\n(I\u2019m thinking of a snapshot of the geese
\nand flurries on the background of these clouds,
\nweightless in those frozen milliseconds\u2014
\nbut sounds too much like a Kodak moment).
\nIt reminds me\u2014I shudder\u2014that we have
\na massive renovation underway.
\nThey say the rubble foundation, shored up
\nwith badly poured concrete thirty years ago,
\nhasn\u2019t supported a pound of house for years,
\neroded by moisture and rotting posts
\nof the old balloon frame. I\u2019ve lived five years
\nin a dwelling propped up by half-inch-thick
\nold-fashioned stucco walls. Explains the cracks
\nI noticed when I bought the place. Good thing
\nDanica hibernates in the basement;
\nteens have keen instincts for self-preservation.<\/p>\n
Gravity isn\u2019t an impressive force.
\nThe bats avoid it when they leave the cave
\nby merely flapping their hands. Look it up.
\nThe parasailing tourists in Grand Cayman
\ndefy it by barely moving a muscle\u2014
\nJetskis do all the work, hauling the sails
\nfifty feet above Caribbean waves.
\nA blade of grass grows straight up through the dirt
\nand bears the weight of its thousand-seed pod.
\nEven the atmosphere\u2019s not held in place;
\nevery minute, my weight in hydrogen
\nreaches escape velocity and wanders
\nwith the solar wake beyond the planets.<\/p>\n
A year-old baby stands up to gravity.
\nI feel as light of foot as Karen Kain.
\nI won\u2019t even break a sweat in step class.<\/p>\n
Hang on a sec, my mother\u2019s on the phone.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s not gravity but time that moves
\nthe planets in their eccentric orbits,
\ninflames the knuckles in my mother\u2019s hands,
\nmakes porous her bones and erodes her hips.
\nArthritis makes it tough for her to smoke.
\nAnd her tumour encroaches invisibly,
\nupward and inward, colonizing her
\nvital organs without regard to weight.<\/p>\n
I think Martin Heidegger had the wrong
\ntitle for Being and Time<\/i>. Being in Time<\/i>\u2014
\nno other way to be. For all the ink
\nof ontologies since Parmenides,
\nanguish resists incarnation in words;
\nit dwells in the skin, the nerves and neurons.
\nThat thought brings not one dose of consolation
\nto my mother. She resents every minute
\nshe bears her aching joints with the wrong meds.<\/p>\n
Without time, relentless Terminator\u2014
\ndaubing the back of my hand with its slow
\nsepia calligraphy, every year
\nmarking me with another final point\u2014
\nGwen, we wouldn\u2019t long for the rhythm of sex;
\nI couldn\u2019t hear you sing or watch you breathe.<\/p>\n
My membership in Aeroplan will end
\nwith enough miles for one trip to the moon.
\nBook my ashes on a rocket there, sweetheart.
\nThe moon\u2019s too light to hold them anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Biography of My Father, the Printer I swept, the day after my father died, a thousand pounds of scrap\u2014plates, rods, wires, gears\u2014 with an industrial broom three feet wide. I didn\u2019t have the energy for tears. I hurled reams of 90lb cover stock, rolls of blank newsprint, corrugated cardboard, stacks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1871,"parent":229,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1412","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1991,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1412\/revisions\/1991"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}