for Jessica H. Donohue Cuthbert

My Father

My father sat alone each morning, drew on a Chesterfield, drank instant coffee, placed a wet-tipped cigarette butt onto a gold church bazaar aluminum ashtray, spit a reedy sliver of tobacco toward the sink and, I believed, rolled thoughts of his life through his emerging awakening as he prepared for the day in the way he’d fashioned over so many mornings like this one. In the predawn, at the kitchen table, in his undershirt he seemed lost, and leaning toward an expectation of some sort he would never share with me. A smoke curl slowly rose and settled under a spongy light above him. His shoulders hunched, his thin body, too small for the largeness of his responsibilities, bent a bit at his waist. I imagined he wondered too deeply. I saw his sad eyes, and feared he wanted another experience, different from this one of us all, his charges. I was afraid. Then he moved toward the work of the day and everything in the world moved with him.