My father does not believe in God or therapists—
instead, he pedals his bike past Brighton Beach
to the Coney Island Y to swim his fifty laps.
Once, I went with him and watched as he emerged
from the locker room in faded swim trunks
moving slowly to the edge of the pool. He paused,
lifting his hands over the gray halo on his chest,
pressing his palms together in a gesture
I know he learned as a boy.
My father’s eyes: devout with a darkness
he keeps buried deep inside
where it glows hell-hot as the ember
from the cigarillo his father—a womanizer,
drunk, half-asleep—dropped on the sheets
setting the bed ablaze, and even though extinguished
kept smoldering invisibly inside the mattress springs,
reigniting, sending the house up in smoke a second time.
So my father’s anger burns, a blood-wicked flame
scorching through the softest parts of his interior
until it rages through the house,
blackening the rooms again.
Even in the absence of ideology
I am trying to learn forgiveness—
I watched my father’s body breach the air for just a moment
before he dove, disappearing beneath the surface.
Steam coiling through the chlorinated room,
the ripples his body made still reached me on the other side.
