The Brooklyn Rail

Before the amputation 
I went to see him, living
alone in that nut-brown
English air. Everything
stale within view. Not
what I had imagined
from his shanty bushed
over the sea for twenty
odd years, lost in wild
daylight. Rushing one
flight up the council flat
my crabbed hand letters
were sent, I opened the door
to him in his wheelchair.
The foot to go jutted out
like a lance, his dark eyes
straggled against mine
then softened. I can’t
recall them for myself
but I’m told I have his eyes.
Bees, I thought, as he
wheeled into the living
room, his eyes looked
like bees, catching some
of what he said streaming
from the seemingly endless,
seemingly indifferent light
frittering through the blinds.
All painfully bachelor,
florid in ways I recognised.
On the train from London
to Milton Keynes I kept
wondering, as his letters
promised, what if he had
taken me up to England,
like my letters pleaded,
then I’d have understood
why concrete cows grazing
in roundabouts looked up
so expectantly at me with
the tight strung silence
that was England. I passed
flattened shades, greys
supersaturated into the beige,
putty history my father sunk
into over years. That was England.
Turning he made another
admission I couldn’t quite
follow, perhaps about
my life. The midafternoon
glare lengthened between
us into a thin place the next
word would’ve shattered.
I stared at his foot propped
on a cushion, weaponlike,
the loneliness of his life shone,
however foolish and lent him
dignity when I entered. His eyes,
as if just noticing, contracted
to inflamed coral at what
was before him, thunder
locked, trumpet tree quiet,
his beast tall reflection
looking down for a future,
seeing only wasted kerosene
nights writing to him here,
this elsewhere England,
the address recited, stored
in wood beams. He moved
forward and it touched me.
Light, toughened plastic,
hollow. I touched it back.
Three toes gone to gangrene.
Sole full of cracks and nail holes.
A deep dead dent in the instep
I pressed my thumb against
and felt the plyboards stuffed
with newspaper of his sea
shanty, left to ruin after he went
away. There I fidgeted weekend,
forcing shadows to scutter
up into a man, his head coiled
heavy with seahorses on
his shoulders that I rode
into the sea. He dissolved,
leaving water trembling
through my fingertips,
serrating the air as he shrunk
behind the peninsula he couldn’t
return to nor now stand to face
what he can’t run away from.