Joining Hands Across Time

First night in his final place My dad called me weeping “Please Bobby bring me home.” His skin like ice cream Melting on handle bars Plopped in his wheelchair Square In the center cone of an empty room Plaster cracked A single nail Where a clock once hung like a moon He said, “They won’t tell me what time it is. I don’t know what time it is.” I hung his hat on that abandoned fish hook Bent to his knees Took off his shoes and massaged his feet Re-storing the bait of heat to his bones. “It’s nearly midnight Dad.” The best time to sit beside a lake With a fire flirting on the lunar water And Aristotle fishing with balled up bread. My Dad, once a boy floating famously on his back Away on Lake Gogebic In an afternoon polished by copper miners To now, a lifetime later of sailing a Butterfly boat Through two-footers on Torch Lake His worn hands joined with his boy’s creamy hands To a rope slipped through a pulley Tightening the sail against the northern wind Creating more speed and angling the boat almost to its side Flattened to the lake Our bodies standing up Face to face To the white sheet pulled and taut Over the nose and chin of the choppy waves. Later that night and forever more My cell phone chimes like a clock Every quarter hour Shaking on my nightstand From Dad’s new land line.