What my dad said I had if I seemed
upset in the slightest. “I’m really not,”
I’d protest. I’d just get the wobbles,
had to lie down when I did. I admit
I didn’t take my jacket or shoes off,
hit the brandy bottle if they persisted,
till words surged to my lips, “Don’t worry,
we’ll get along some day, dad, just wait.”
He’s oiling his twelve-gauge again, which
I’m supposed to inherit, but he’s given up
showing me how to take it apart, put it back
together, so if I’m ever drafted he says I’d
have a leg up. Sometimes it seems life’s
whole meaning can be summed up in his
one remark: PROVE IT, which’d mean
myself to him. When I finally learned to
lead the duck till its half-crazy smile froze
on its face, the shell hit home. Dad led me
by the arm to where it lay. I tried resisting.
Knives and forks, not to mention weapons,
would have had to be invented first. All
this had to happen so many times before I
could breathe without a paper sack and dad
no longer had to tilt my head back, no longer
looked me in the eye, no longer stroked my
feverish temples with his stocky fingers.
Stuart Friebert has published twelve books of poems, among them Funeral Pie, which co-won the Four Way Book Award. He has two volumes of translations forthcoming: The Stomach of the Soul: Selected Poems of Sylva Fischerova (Calypso Editions) and Puppets in the Wind: Selected Poems of Karl Krolow (Bitter Oleander Pess), and eight volumes of translations previously published, most recently joint translations with Sylva Fischerova of her selected poems, entitled The Swing in the Middle of Chaos (Bloodaxe, 2010). He has published two volumes of selected Karl Krolow poems and recently completed a third. He founded the writing program at Oberlin College and co-founded FIELD and the Oberlin College Press. Recent poems and translations have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, AGNI, Pleiades, and elsewhere. (updated 10/2013)