That day I sat astride the roof ridge
sorting cedar shingles and nailing them
in long rows, planting them, two nails each,
my hands sweating in their gloves.
Nearby the portable phone, silent and white,
napped through all this noise, like a good baby.
Or as if it were anesthetized
like my father, five hundred miles west,
whose afternoon was completely devoted
not to bridge or the Giants’ game,
but to heart surgery,
to paying death a call, and coming away.
I moved across the roof as the sun
moved across the sky, and my apprehension
was as big as the house beneath me.
My job was to follow the blue chalk line,
east to west, carrying bundles of fragrant wood.
No one waited below, worried sick,
for word the house would live.
There was no hurry. It was November
and it never rains in Albuquerque in November.
Rush hour was beginning — I could see far off
where shining cars poured onto the freeway —
when the phone rang. Mother. It had gone well . . .
there were others to call . . . she’d glimpsed him
on the gurney as they returned him to his room,
“and I thought he was dead, he was so blue.”
The sky all around me was blue,
but night would change that soon.
A cool wind rose from the valley, from the river,
and I shivered, looking west over the city,
toward Phoenix, beyond the mesa, across the desert.
I would see my father again.
Thanksgiving Day. I entered his room alone,
without husband or child, and took his hand.
Our hands were as alike as my left is to my right,
one a little larger, used to doing more.
The shades were drawn
but he showed me, in the dark,
where they’d parted his chest,
and it was a coarse, enormous, fresh scar,
like the first furrow on the virgin prairie.
It had been, he said, “tougher than I’d anticipated.”
But his face was already
more alive than it had been for years,
the color back, the blood flowing
like a river undammed, whole and free
as it once was, flooding the brown valley
as it once did, and his brow was smooth
as he lay back against his pillow,
and said he was ready to see the children.