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In Father’s Day
By reputation, my father drank far more
than he really did,
but he did write his name in yellow
in the snow outside the merchants Bank
around Christmas, back in the 50’s,
when he was laid off and George’s
wouldn’t run a tab anymore.
“Dotted the I’s, crossed the t’s,”
he always like to say, when he told it.
And he went out four nights running
for a tree that year, stayed late, and
never got one home,
but he did try to get my mother some
flowers that Spring, picked ‘em
in the park while the police watched,
and he called me “a promising lad”
when he introduced me to officers
Sullivan and O’Connor at the station
when I went to get him home. “Coupla
prods nailed me in the park,” he said.
And promised me a favor someday off
in the future, the future I know,
the future fathers invent
at just such a moment.
Party
Drunks talk just this bit off center
enter to that side a bit wide of topics
strung together almost so brilliantly
they impress themselves with the newness
the variety of it pride themselves on
their memory grab for the extraneous
the telltale name the date
their second cousins' cat's name
the brown one 'member with the six toes
or uncle freddie's first wife's name frieda
frieda 'n freddie what a pair
spent that whole year loaded there
'til she took off with the milkman
the bilkman someone the dumb one
anyone mus' seem better than freddie after a time,
and they're sure enough welcome round this room
with their witty gestures and breath
they seem so fine tonight
the bes' people around, and I've known 'em all
was there the night at george's
round christmas when someone said something
to someone's wife then pulled a knife
a bad crowd that night all right
cops and them charges and a crazy bastard
sayin' I pulled a knife on his wife
but they all know she was with me
no one's wife 'least not his
and the most beautiful woman
I'd ever seen til' you of course
and besides I didn't even own a knife at all
or at least not at that time,
and tonight's different we can jus' get together
and talk like this civil as all hell
'n hang out like this do what we gonna do
just stan' aroun' and have a few.
J.K. Durick is presently a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont,
after a long career teaching literature, humanities, and writing at Trinity
College of Vermont. His recent poems have appeared in the SN Review, Onion River
Review, Delta Epsilon Sigma Journal, and in the anthology, The Breath of Parted
Lips: Voices From the Robert Frost Place
Email: J.K. Durick
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