Tenderness
Susan Wood
I can hardly believe the story
they told, how he’d come home, exhausted,
in the sweltering dusk, the sun
tilting toward the end
of summer, and find us both
crying, hungry, and how he’d take me up
from the crib and walk me
back and forth across the apartment’s
two small rooms, his shirt stuck
to his back, hungry himself,
while all the time my mother lay
weeping and rubbing her raw, red nipples,
until finally, long after dark, I’d fall asleep
on his shoulder and he’d lie down,
gently, on the bed, my body
cradled against his chest, my cheek
to his heart, a tiny boat
at rest, at last, on the lake of him.
I can believe, though, he’d thump my feet
to wake me to feed just when I’d fallen
asleep, if that’s what it took,
like I believe all his life he lived
by the rules and never asked why,
or how, never asked anything, really,
except that the figures add up,
while he sat at the kitchen table
night after night, the adding machine
clicking away like needles, and under the table
the boy he used to be crouched
in the dark and waited for his father
to fall silent at last, save for the snores
that rattled his chest, and the boy
would rise then and go out in the dark
and the cold to find what bottles were left
and pour the liquid gold onto the ground.
Sometimes, though, I imagine he’d take one
by the neck and smash it and smash it
against the woodpile, crying and cursing, tears
and snot running into his mouth,
until he’d come back to himself, not sure
where he was, his fingers bloody with glass.
I can believe that. It’s the tenderness
I can’t believe. I don’t know what changed,
but for years he never touched me
except in anger, never held my small face
in his hands and kissed me. Some nights
I’d watch the moon through the blinds
lay down a ladder of light on the floor
and I could almost see the burglar
who’d come creeping in, his face masked
like the mask I wore in the ether dream,
a tiger turning to pin points of light, tiger
burning bright as a sun.
I’d call out, then, for my father to come
and save me from whatever I feared.
And what was that, really? Not burglar,
not tiger, but something else, the self a planet
spinning out of control. It’s the way I thought
I’d disappear in the cloud of his anger that time
he found me, down for a nap, drifting
and dreaming and touching myself,
and shouted and turned red in the face
and said I should be ashamed of myself.
Couldn’t he see that I was?
Maybe he didn’t believe in
his tenderness, either, and I know
I don’t always know what to believe
any more, but I know what I wanted,
and want: I want that tenderness
back, my cheek against my father’s
heart, my small body circled in his arms.
I want it to be the moment night crosses
the threshold of day—oh, I want the sun
and the moon and the stars, all three, and my father
holding me up to the window, whispering,
All this is yours.
