Launch

Al Pittman, April 11, 1940 - August 26, 2001


When the lesson begins,
I am six years old,
standing on the silty bottom of a lake in Maine
face to face with my father
who lowers his black beard into the water
and demonstrates how to leave earth behind.

Push off, he says, with a breast stroke.
His mouth breaches the surface
and he smiles, whiskers and teeth glistening
like a flash of trout leaping.

He is just within, and out of my reach:
thirty-six years old,
as I am now thirty-six.
We circle each other, like Pisces.

I remember thunderheads gathering
at the edge of the sky.
The water was cool and dark
like the river near our home
where he canoed and fished and where
I poured out by the fistful
the ash of his teeth and bones.
How it glinted as it fell
through my hands
rain falling
on a lake in Maine
my father
like God
moving over the face of the waters.

I believed in it,
and pushed off.


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filed under: poetrywriting