He remembers how, when the last guests left, 
the house settled in to stillness, and how his

Mother sat on the porch swing, quiet hands folded, 
pushing back and forth into the silent night.

The pendulum of time always moved, forward,
forward, but his father was snared

In the backward drag, and for that he was
serving the life sentence of a single moment.

His boyhood memories were cubed in ice,
frozen with his father in time;

They drifted behind him, an azure iceberg 
heavy with the treachery of love.

He was brave on sunny days, letting the
ice thaw only until his tears flowed;

Then he ran for coldness, knowing the danger
of losing any solid ground he’d found.

The memories of his father were death and life, 
joy and pain, the terrible weight of knowing  

The man was gone who strummed a guitar 
in the moonlight to sing him to sleep.

The man was gone who played bathtub boats
and soaped his hair into trollish peaks. 

The man was gone who gave him a wild
kitten that pounced on his feet as he slept.

The man was gone who laughed when he set 
their worms free to wriggle into the forest floor.

The man was gone who held his hand as they walked
back to the camp with an empty fishing pail.

The man was gone who crashed with him against the 
waves and chased crabs with seaweed brooms.

The boots, bandannas, and handcuffs were gone, 
along with shrieks of ambush and retreat. 

In the last round of hide and seek, he slipped a silver                                                     pistol from the man’s nightstand, and lay in wait.

His hands still feel the tight trigger and the
startling recoil; his eyes see again the falling bandit;

His whoops of victory echo in his ears, 
as his body tumbles anew into the rush forward  

To arrest and bring the outlaw to justice, 
in the moment the West was lost.  

The days that followed passed like shuffled cards before him.
He dressed slowly for the funeral, taking from the peg

The tie his father gifted him, tied in a careful knot 
by the man’s hands.  He laced the shoes that 

Shone from the quick sure strokes of his father’s
lesson; the ink yet fading from his hands.

He remembers the start of that day and the ending, 
and nothing else, save the tie clutched against his throat, 

And when he slipped it off, the pressure remained.
He undressed before his mirror, loathing the reflection.

Ten years had passed, and the tie still hung from a peg, 
his small shoes laid to rest against the baseboard.

He couldn’t find his way out, remembering and 
forgetting, equally matched, fighting for ground.  

His citadel of ice loomed always in the background,  
sounding off in deep groans and hissing whispers.

If he were to set it adrift, he’d lose his twist of happiness 
and anguish, the only thing he had left of his father.

There he sat, on his small patch of land, a young man with his
iceberg, getting accustomed to frost, slowly merging into blue.

-Chali Davis