Getting You Back

(a guest poem by
Steele Fields)

You never let me have the car. So one night, I stole it anyway.
Drove it piled high with my friends across the bridge to Jersey
where we drank beer and ran up the mileage and no one wore seatbelts.
I was getting you back for having weird, outdated eyewear
and a totally un-cool comb-over
we laughed at when you weren’t around.
The car was a 1960 Rambler. It had a pinkish rust primer coat for a paint job
and featured a push button transmission, reclining pleather seats
and strange, curvy tail lights resembling exotic open eyelashes
over winking red eyes
which for some reason embarrassed me-
but just not enough to keep me from wanting the car.

I was getting you back for not helping me with my homework
because you only went as far as the sixth grade
and had to learn a trade instead,
and for our faces bearing no resemblance whatsoever
while the rest of the world’s children had their parents’ faces
superimposed over their own.

I was getting you back for that too.
And for being fine with the fact that even though I appeared out of nowhere
you called me your daughter without passing anything down to me;
not one freckle, or dimple -not even a lousy allergy.
For being a mechanic and raising a poet.
And especially for keeping the rare Paul Newman diamond blue eyes all to yourself.

I was getting you back.

I was busy growing up and you were busy growing tomatoes
(much to my mother’s annoyance) in a pot on the radiator
the wonder of it being the dead of winter
a fact largely ignored by me until the day I found you
gently holding one tiny, summer- perfect miracle
that looked exactly like a cherry tomato and tasted like a grapefruit.

Rummaging through an old shoebox yesterday,
looking for ammunition among ragged edged Polaroids,
I found a few of you- they were mostly shots of you
out fishing with your brothers on some grayish dock,
hoisting up some grayish fish still hooked and heavy
and hanging perilously close to your head
with a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beside your left foot
and you’re wearing an expression bordering on pride.
Then there’s the one of you and mom on your honeymoon riding horses.
Mom looks absolutely petrified and the horses look incredibly bored
and you look exactly the same as you do in the one with you and the fish.
Then I found the one where you’re cradling me with callused hands
more comfortable curled around a hammer handle;
your work-toughened fingers standing out in stark relief
against the soft grayness of the blanket.
It was our first day together and you were handing me
to Mom, (who was sitting in the Rambler)
her face a pale cathedral and yours, so amazed,
that the rare Paul Newman diamond blueness of your eyes
broke right through the gray wash
and they were holding even more of me than your hands were.


© Steele Fields