How suddenly I walked from the stage of my father’s life,
and because he objected to the violence in a video.
He asked me to pack and go, to leave his house—
I was 1100 miles from Ohio. Said it was about respect.
All right, I said, loading the stuff of my life.
He’d risen from the sofa, incensed, out of his mind
with those years he’d repaired Minuteman missiles.
(He carried the Cold War like a retirement watch.)
In the movie, though, the dead fell one at a time.
They weren’t white or American, anything to him.
It’s like this car salesman who got tired of his life
and, pressing, said, You must drive this car!
I told him what I told my father in Florida
as I turned to go: No one has to do shit.
I don’t know. Maybe the spray of blood and brain
became present in the room—what else?—in a way
it never had when he fixed the nuclear arsenal.
But only when he rose, like the heavens had opened,
did I begin to believe he cared about anyone.
And then his soul was this shout you had to hear.