I was still standing although
Gabriella Wells and Barbara Ryan were too, their bodies dark against the wall of light that dull-pewter December afternoon, shadows with words that flowed
so easily from their mouths,
fluorescent and grievous,
pied and effervescent,
words I'd spelled out to the rhythm
of my father's hoarse whispers
during our nightly practice sessions beneath the dim bulb,
superfluous, excelsior,
desultory and exaggeration
mixed with his Schaefer breath
and Lucky Strike smoke
as I went down
The List of Most Difficult Words
with a man whose wife had left,
one son grown into madness,
the other into death,
my father's hundred-and-five-pound skeleton of skin glowing in that beer-flooded kitchen when he'd lift the harmonica
to blow a few long, sad riffs of country into a song
while he waited for me to hit the single l of spiraling,
the silent i of receipt,
the two of us working words hard those nights on Olmstead Street, sure they would someday save me.