Exhaustion moves in like a mean season.
Thoughts become rigid as teeth, or cattle
in winter, only the steady
steaming proves you’re alive.
Bought out by the sheer con of solitude
the year’s open mouth looks like a red
room of your own.
My father now
trundles through the clean halls
of the house waiting on news
of a matched heart speeding over
Alberta in a tin icebox to plunk itself down in the bloody
plush of his chest,
take up where
it left off, only this time in strange
company, struggling to keep warm
in the Ottawa Valley. Forgetting
the meaning of chinook.
I’m wondering what my father is thinking
as he waits for some young man on a motorbike
to fishtail his way into that dark, blunt syllable,
revving up more cocksure love than either one
of us could muster —
with my own heart this still,
I’ll hear the grinding metal when the Yamaha drops.