Portrait of the Centaur as a Father
On a night long and full of stars, he pulls a deck of cards from a drawer in his workshop,
filled with spoons, tableknives the size and shape of the hollow beneath my jaw.
If it’s on one of those cards, or on the radio, I’ve done it.
His cards and their stringy kings and queens show me the exact hour I will become reliant
on alcohol. Their prophecy is impeccable. Bow and quiver across his back, arrows
fletched with maple, I wonder when they said he’d burn the world down,
replant our fields with poppies instead of hay, kick one house apart for another, another.
He knew decorative from loadbearing grains of the forest, and from observing him,
I can identify the trees on the highway; from the radio, every song’s singer,
as we gallop through canyons, rockslides, trailer parks littered with orange caps, hoof on
the gas. I climbed mountains behind him in six different cars, babysat my brother
and our bladders, while he went around planting syringes and round burnholes.
And still his needling whistle rings across the fields, summoning our dog with the horseshoe scar
and stump tail. I have learned to make that sound with my own mouth, but the dog
has long stopped running. I do not know where he is buried. If he was buried.
We could never outrun my stepfather’s stampeding legs, his aim. I have tried to stem my
sprouting fur, to run with no stars but satellites to guide me.
My belly swaying with drink and stones, I have waded into acequias to sleep, to dream
of green fields, only to wake again, thrashing. I didn’t stop to catch my breath until
I knew for sure he was dead. I have believed that the dead cannot chase.
I have believed and absorbed many lies. I have told more, and believed those, too.
But when he died, and I finally mapped the sky without him, I stood from the back seat
to a field with no poppies, no prints in the fresh mud, no guardrails to lean on and no
drunk stumble homeward.
My paws are no longer caked with bitter chocolate, my voice no slurred growl.
I perk my ears and birds carol on the wind. The sun rise in my throat.
Somewhere, a dog barks.
But my brother climbs in and shuts the door behind him, mane sprouting from his neck,
and my mother whispers, When will my boys grow up? When will my boys be men?
All of us half-animal, half-man. All broken and pieced together.
She waits in the driveway, watching for the sun.
I wait, too.