My father’s hand pressed against the table, one arm reaching
down to pull the plug, the saw ran over his fingers.
I do not tell it well—the way he was calm when he waited
for the ambulance, bound his bleeding hand with duct tape,
watched with a mirror in surgery as they tried to sew him up.
I forget the most important parts. How I was so young,
I barely knew what the blood meant. How I was scared
of the stitches—like black worms burrowing in his hand.
How even now, when we hold each other to pray over dinner,
his fingers can never quite curl around mine. He says sometimes
they burn and itch where there’s no flesh to scratch. I do not tell
it well, how good of a carpenter he is, how this was the one mistake
he never made again. I’m sorry I always speak first of the mistakes.
I still don’t know what it was he was making. For years, he built
for others while we heated our meals on a door off its hinges—
balanced over two sawhorses, hotplate inlaid. This is what comes
to my mind, instead of him, as I laugh into my cup. I do not tell
it right. The door. I can’t remember what color the paint was.
There was a hole left for a handle. Sometimes I would stick
my small wrist through it, shake my own hand on the other side.

This time of year does not forget.
Grass stains the same spots on my knees. Buzzards
circle the same patches of earth where the dead wait.

My shoes go slick against the sidewalk & time loses
meaning. It is years ago, again—my feet slipping on lichen-
licked rocks, he is handing me the knife. My fingers shake

against the damp black bark—I carve our names, snap
his blade back shut. I promised myself I’d never do that
to a tree, then I did. I promised myself I’d never go back,

now look at me. It’s April again, so I’m remembering
his fist through the wall & the broom in my hands,
sweeping where his home needed tending.

Propped on the floor beside the broken glass—
his first-grade photo: blue shirt with collar stretched,
his unsure smile, hands—I hope—not balled in his lap.

Yes, that spring was wet & flowering, too.
It’s what made it so cruel. Circling the same gray sky.
I know he doesn’t think about what I do.