Portside

The Family
By Maxine Scates

The flying shards of metal entered his body
and the fire burned him in the flaming sea where
he was flung among the living and the dead.  Months
then when his wounds were healing,
or so it seemed, his arms splotchy, fading as the years passed,
but the shrapnel stayed, in his hands, his back, little
boats forever sailing in the sea of him.  And the plane
heading for the ship, the explosion, the blood all happened
again and again.  He loved to hurt, 
to be hurt, as if to make his almost drowning visible.
And though he said he’d never hit a woman, he’d hurl
an ashtray or a plate, and then he’d ask for it,
right up in her face he’d say the words
she hated over and over until she slapped his face
again and again, his glasses falling, or she cracked a glass
over his head, him yelling for a towel, get me a towel
he pleaded, then wrapping it around his head.  Hours later,
he returned bandaged, almost pleased.   Having stopped
for a drink, he brought gifts.  She’d already mopped
the blood by then.  He was wounded.
He was a casualty of war.  He was the plane heading
for the house each night.  He was the explosion.  His fist
made a hole in the bedroom wall above his son’s head.
His fist shattered the window.  He fell sodden then and slept.
Years later a woman said he was not tragic,
and you knew that was because he was not a man
who fell from great heights, only a truck driver
falling from his own height.  The son left first, but not
before he learned to knock his father down.
He carried what he couldn’t forget, but never spoke of it.
The wife tried never to be in the same room,
stayed in the kitchen ironing after she came home from work.
And then, though she feared he’d kill her first,
she told him he had to leave, and because even he knew
they could not go on, he did.  After he was gone,
she forgot because that was her way, her one foot in front
of the other.  You are the daughter.
You are the one who watched,
who saw the blood spreading over the broken glass,
or puddled by the wash pan with its dent the shape of his head,
with its fine human hairs, not like the cat in the street,
the dog, all of childhood’s dead, but the stringy mop swirling
through its thickness, your mother’s hands wringing it
into the bucket, the water turning red as the sea,
how it colored everything.

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone (New Issues 2011), Black Loam and Toluca Street, and co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon). Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review and have received, among other awards, the Starrett Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes.
http://www.amazon.com/Undone-New-Issues-Poetry-Prose/dp/193097499X/ref=…