FOR MY FATHER

 

On the couch

in my mother’s home;

the phone rings,

it was late June.

 

The quick, deep voice

of a doctor:

“It is cancer,”

My body

sinks into the couch.

 

‘I’m too young,’

I kept thinking.

‘Surely it hasn’t spread,’

and this boat ain’t sinking.

 

The phone dropped.

The scuttling of my mother upstairs;

my father reading on the patio

as I thought of what to say.

 

Her sweet smile,

the smile of a loving mother,

approaches me in the living room.

How can I have the heart to tell her

that her son may soon be in a tomb?

 

‘it’s cancer,’ I said,

standing straight

but eyes fixed on the floor.

I broke with her

and cried for what’s in store.

 

‘I have to be strong for dad,’

and be the man

he always wanted me to be,

not the coward

who wants to flee.

‘I ruined his life,’

he was to say later,

in a hospital hallway:

“I ruined his life,”

after we found out it had spread.

Stage four, Inoperable,

yer gonna end up dead.

 

I couldn’t let him think that,

my dear father,

the man who put up with my addictions,

and suffered through my life’s disorder.

 

I wasn’t meant to hear

what he had said,

so I texted him soon after,

letting him know he is a great father.

 

‘If it could only have been me,’

cried my father

on the way back from the first cat scan.

but if it had been him,

I’d be dead already.