®

Today's poem is by Geffrey Davis

Unfledged
       

Weekends too, my father roofed poor neighborhoods,
at prices only his back could carry

into profit. After he convinced our mother of
labor's virtue—or was it another bill collector's

callous calls again?—my brother and I became his
two-boy cleanup crew. During those hard,

gloved hours under the sun's weight, I studied
my father, from the ground—the distance he kept

between us his version of worry. This work gave him chances
to patch over his latest night in county jail, to shout

over something other than his drug-induced belly song.
More than witnessing the way he knew a hammer,

more than the sweat, the grace of his body grew
when I noticed the cheap pigeon magazines tucked

in his back pocket—black & white photos of pedigreed
squabs he'd fallen for, folded for a later that never came:

the careful study we do with things that refuse
to become ours. Evenings, he spent tending to his home-made

kit-box of birds, bathed in the constant coos
from a mongrel mix: orphaned Birmingham rollers

and a few hand-captured homers that he bred
the distance out of, turning our block into the new destination

their blood pulled them toward. On the job, from below,
as he perched and drove nails through the day's heat,

I checked the silhouetted length of his back for signs
of stiffness, and his impossible arms, anything I might point to—

certain, like most people, if the ache could be found, you'd know
how to start soothing, where to place your hands.



Copyright © 2014 Geffrey Davis All rights reserved
from New Madrid
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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