Mostly, I watch from a window
in the house where my father fell, as he falls.
Sometimes, though, I’m in school, just back
from recess. Heatstruck, dizzy with spinning.
The teacher hovers to me. I look up and wait
for her to speak. Chalk dust stings my eyes shut.
I am telling the truth, even if
both can’t be true, even if every memory
is just me searching for the bonebreak
moment between innocence
and constant fear.
Here, I dig my face
into a snowdrift.
There, I wait for him
to wake up on the flat raft of his thin hospital bed.
Here, I chase the ragged coin
of a horny toad at the first crack of summer.
There, my mother is dragging me
by the sleeve, her eyes wet and arms blurred,
toward the vanishing point of a hospital corridor.
Mostly, I watch from a window
when my father comes down. Feet first.
Strangle snared by gravity. He slips inch
by inch past my square of air, his face
monotone and shocked, like a silent actor
dangling from a clock hand. Beyond,
the sun matches his speed, lolling softly
toward the black blade of a hill.
Here, he is a journeyman
tarring HUD houses on the Navajo Reservation,
chopping down rattlesnakes on his lunch break.
There, his cheek is torn
by tar as he floats gently past
my arms, reaching out with his brush.
Here, the breeze stops
as he steps back, expecting more roof, less air,
and so many more years of running, of chasing,
of carrying sons on his shoulders.
There, the sun matches
his slide down the side of the house, away
from me, until everything crashes at one point:
tailbone, horizon, footpath, body of light.
I look away when his spine buckles,
away from the cloud of dust that lingers
and rises where he fell.
I look up and wait for him
to step back into the sky again.
–
Micah Chatterton’s first collection, Go to the Living, was published in 2017. His work has appeared widely, including in Pratik, EcoTheo, Tupelo Quarterly, and Best New Poets. Micah teaches rhetoric and library at San Bernardino Valley College and is waiting for a new heart because his old one mutinied.