The conversations I treasure with my father are when life is thick,
calibrated for someone with muscles, a la Arnold, circa 1970.

I don’t ask about the years sweating through C130 jet jammies,
the adrenaline squint and salt crusted glass like blinds, ripping lives
from frothing canines of rabid Bering Sea. The Memorial Day knells
and widows brine that drove him to coax groans from floorboards
into photographic memory of drab morning.

He doesn’t ask about the seams, healed to spiderweb white,
where the man who bound my finger in gold and stone, pressed
caustic knowledge into me until I driveled rust. Shrieks buzzing
like flies on pink fleshed roadkill, fermenting in oversized hoodies,
to manifest in sage half moons, under darting gaze.

We don’t talk about those things. We swirl coffee and cream.
We talk about the Boston cabby, with the bent nose and worse fender.
The enigmatic professor of poetry, who couldn’t say what anything means.
A poem is a poem. It means what it does.

In the deadlift static, we do nothing, curating mundanity.