Ron Smith

“Leaving Forever

My son can look me level in the eyes now,
and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch
chainsaw murders at the midnight movie,
that he must bend his mind to Biology,
under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp.
Outside, his friends throb with horsepower
under the moon.

He stands close, milk sour
on his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction,
eye-whites pink from his new contacts.
He can see me better than before. And I can see
myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head
in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours
of his unwrinkled flesh.

At the window he waves
a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare
of tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder,
but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes,
the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wall
at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed
in the bedroom window I had climbed through
at three A.M.

"If you hit me I'll leave forever,"
I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine.
"I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all."
Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow light
of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey,
ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in
his thick glasses, the two of us grinning,
as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.”
― Ron Smith, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery: Poems