Andrea Potos challenges the assumption that the lives of the elderly matter less as she considers a complicated relationship with a complicated father.
—
My Father, Recovering from Brain Injury
People nod and smile,
then move on, I sense
they assume, at 85,
he’s had his share of life,
what’s the deal, why expect
or ask for more?
I can’t explain how the hair
returning to my father’s scalp
is like a sky filling with silver lightning,
that my father is large enough to contain
Whitman’s multitudes–
a man of flesh and myth,
and that, in the labyrinth of my life,
he has been both the minotaur
and the one who has rescued with the thread.
***
Previously published in Poetry East and in An Ink Like Early Twilight (Salmon Poetry).
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