Linda Neal

Dad's Wilderness

 

Dad spent nights poring over maps spread out

across the scarred teak table,

charting our route, spent hours on lists—

 

1 toothbrush ea.

2 pr. extra shorts ea.

1 pr. extra socks ea.

1 sm. flashlight ea.

1 packet waterproof matches

 

and so on, weighing every item

for each pack. Took me back to late nights

at the kitchen table with a math problem where

odd never evened out, and to a much earlier day,

when he propped me in a saddle in front of him,

held me tight around the waist

while I gripped the roan mare's mane

on a ride through pines, up boulders,

beyond our narrow city lives.

Dad fell easy into the story from his youth,

when he was a young mountain man,

backpacker, horsepacker, wilderness guide.

 

Trucking up the side of the mountain,

twenty-eight years older than me, twenty-eight years stronger,

at seventy-something, after dozens of solitary hikes in the Sierras,

Dad was leading me into a wilderness I'd barely dreamed.

After all these years growing apart, we were together,

him guiding me on this mid-July three-day

when the river flowed too high to ford and

he forgot the bear rope.

 

Just us, alone with river, trees, each other and morning light

that kept us in mind on its journey across the sky; I was on

the mountain with the man I came from, my pack flapping

against my plaid shirt, the smell of lightning and rain rising

in the distance. I wanted only to hike high, higher, walk

further, walk as steady as he walked. At dusk, I sang

to the steeple of twigs we gathered from the duff,

sang to the fire, to him and the air. He said to me,

 

I'll sleep with the food.

He took another bite of beans.

Isn't that dangerous?

I sip coffee. Wait. The fire lights his face.

They'd rather tear a bag down from a tree

than ransack an old man like me.

 

 

Beauty Dog

 

Beauty dog. Beauty dog.

Curled up in the corner

of the sofa, palomino fur,

black point of nose.

 

She reflects afternoon's sun

off her thick white chest fur.

Beauty dog. Beauty dog.

 

Small miracle of tongue

that rasps my dingy skin,

fringed ears that hear my sorrow.

 

Beauty dog. Beauty dog.

Folded in the corner

of the sofa, shows me

how to be.

 

Measuring Love

No calculators can compute

the distance between

me and what I love.

Everything I love fits

between

me and what I fear:

famines and fires,

cities burning

rumors, feasts before dark.

flags and floods

and Holy Thursday.

 

Each bent and damaged detail

of family matters.

The list is long,

begins with Grandma's song

and a worn yardstick

standing in the corner

of her sewing room,

the faded numbers calling my name;

she's measuring the hem

on my first pencil skirt,

green as jade.

 

What I want,

no abacus can calculate,

no clerk in the city

can bring to me.

Through the grating

in my bedroom wall

I smell the lime tree dying,

plates of cake rotting in the heat,

the death of garlic.

The burglars of the sun

have stolen ripe peaches

from my father's tree.

The white promise of the moon

remains,

immutable, translucent overhead.

 

At the end of a thin path

over dunes,

through tumbleweeds

where the secret breath

of horses lives,

past the sound

of windblown sand

that covers history over,

I stretched my arms

over backs of clouds

and sang.