Tim Snyder: 5 Poems
Dear Dad
If night is now, I will close my eyes
and wake into last year before you died,
just as you turn and yell at me.
Your baseball cap eyes
shadowed deeply, sweat drips off
your chin, water bulged
ankles and shoes untied.
When you finish,
I’ll tell you that I love you.
The day unfolds its own way; I yell back,
and everything names itself.
In the silence between that name
and what we call it, I wake into your cells
I trample over, again and again, only to find,
clearly enough, your hands are mine
End of the Widow’s Walk
All the history of silence lifts
your oceanic gaze
down the length of your legs
past your blackening feet
and the footboard of the hospital bed,
through the door, down the hall
of doors, out the window.
Friday afternoon and the doctor
steps in between birth and death
at 3:30 to pronounce the terrible liberation.
Dear Mom
Sparrows erased the trail of breadcrumbs home already
and I can feel extremities again
but I forgot nearly everything you said
shortly after you spoke, even the sound your voice made—
erased. When I think,
I think I should have written some of it down,
but where do your children live now that we’ve spread your ashes
in the vegetable garden dad planted out back of our home?
Sparrows erase crumbs and your daughters and I sold that house.
Home is where the sparrows find breadcrumbs.
Last Call
Are there bars in Heaven? Lately
I’ve wondered, though not for pressing reasons.
You see, I hear my mother’s laugh
because my arms are no-longer
long enough to get at the not-so-fine print
without my glasses. It’s always this way.
We joke of our parents’ failing eyesight
but we’re heir to bifocals, and she laughs
and laughs while I squint at words
arm’s-length away. How is it
that in her life I could not see
what I so clearly see now?
Over two beers my professor chats up my father,
football: not the European version, mind you,
the violent American kind. He never explained
this love, and I, dutiful child
of the generation gap, never tried to listen.
It’s always this way. His biography
of silence and my recalcitrance of stone
add up to an empty room where knowledge
finds no voice. Now, in death, he finds time
for chats his children’s time in life absorbed.
How is it that in his life I could not hear
what I so clearly hear now?
My mother debates fingerings—
a Gershwin piece—with my Bible
teacher as they sit at a black grand
just off the bar in a smoke-filled room.
She tried to show me how
once. All I saw was a row of black and white keys
and a box of wood. Now, in death,
she finds time for music her children’s time
in life absorbed.
Folks smile and drink and cheer
as my wife’s parents enter the bar
in time to swing-dance.
A Story Fathers Might Tell
Wait inside sleep for the sun
to tell a story of ice-fog this morning.
Forest of branches gilded white and bird song
shoulders the weight of a cathedral.
Deep inside the cathedral a boy crosses the alter
and lights a candle. Did he know then he’d be a father?
Later the boy, now a man, dusts doors’ lintels
in his house because his daughter’s story arrived.
So many stories unfold—
his voice finishes while his daughter’s daughter waits
to begin and in silences between one story and the next
ice-fog and bird song and other cathedrals unfold.
Tim Snyder, originally from Rochester, New York, lives with his wife in a small house on a narrow road with a dog and six cats in Northwestern Ohio. He divvies up his time working on his house, teaching composition, and interpreting for Deaf folks in his adoptive home state. He has published his poetry in journals such as The Poet’s Billow, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Aphor Magazine, and Albatross.