Jason Irwin

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER, 1959

  

To have known you then –

the summer of your senior year,

posing bare chested,

like Charles Atlas,

in front of a ‘52 Impala,

a boyish grin, a lock of dark hair

hanging over your eyes –

I know we would not

be friends. The way

you can envision

the flight path of a hawk

as it circles and glides,

almost hanging in the air,

until, suddenly it swoops down

to snatch a squirrel

from the tree outside

your apartment window.

I’m sorry for it all:

our not being friends,

the years

and the disappointments

they’ve brought,

wanting at times to be cruel,

to diminish you, yet still

needing you. For all the words

that stick in our throats

and remain unsaid.

It’s as if we’ve been stranded

on opposite shores

of a frozen lake. We both know

that if we venture out

onto the ice, it will crack, 

and neither of us has courage

enough for that.

* * *

AT THE HOTEL CADILLAC

The old man next to me at the bar
smelling of Bryllcreem
and a kidney infection, his face
the color of uncooked chicken,
mutters into his glass:
“Walt Disney? General Patton?
Fuck ‘em. I know what’s what.”

* * *

Jason Irwin is the author of Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008), winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, and the chapbooks Where You Are (Night Ballet Press, 2014), & Some Days It's A Love Story (Slipstream Press, 2005), and A Blister of Stars (forthcoming: Coleridge Street Press, 2016). He has also had work published in Poetry East, Sycamore Review, Confrontation, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY, and now lives in Pittsburgh. www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com