I miss the stars the way they used to be. Swirling in the low hanging velvet sky, navy blue and black getting drunk together and shaking so violently in their fervor you’d think a Baptist was barreling her hips down the Milky Way at me. Tempting me to jump. I miss the feeling of home, sleeping in the silence of a house that my father built, whether that sleep came soft and alone, or warm with those arms around me.
Nights I walked on the pitch black gravel road, with dogs yelping their gangland frenzy in the distance. Over the mountains that protected and yielded. Walking naked and drunk to the cold river, under the spotlight moon, creatures to and fro and yesterday’s leaves blowing round the dirty show. Nothing the next day but a red bra left at the dock soggy and busted while I picked wildflowers and felt the soreness that you gave me. Other nights, tired from work and nails and building walls my father could not anymore, I miss sitting on my front porch getting bitten away by tiny teeth, drinking cheap wine and listening to the frogs in the same river, calling us there and wondering why we were too tired to give them a peep show again.
On the days I was alone there and the same nights in winter, the sound of the soft biting wind filled clear my lungs, and the skinny northern trees bare and naked shrilling back and forth, twirling their wares back at me, as the white crunchy snow and old Indian burial grounds stood nearby. I saw a ghost man in a fire once, burning with a flicker just far away enough that I couldn’t tell if he was real or not.
While chanting those necessary words, and dreaming dreams and facing the white eye in the sky one on one, a squirrel mad with syphilis or some rodentia dementia fell right down like a bullet, shot to the wooded floor from at least 20 feet down from heaven. He shook his head and bounced around a bit, then scurried off to get himself nuts, in the hands or stolen from the saner of his neighbours.
Slugs in rain time, falling along, when I used to turn back at the yellow amber warmth of home; our family was always together there even when my brother was trying to live his life on his own. I brought more and more visitors to them, and they complained but always came around. Barbecues and back porches, quiet phone calls and morning coffee on the front porch. Endless fires being built, sometimes to drunken extremes. The best drunk (except one) I ever got was with my family.
The knowledge that it could not last forever, the guilt that it was this structure and the might of what was lost by it that sighed in every ache and pain and quiet, non complaint my father ever made. In my mother’s nervous worry every time she came home from shopping for groceries. But always knowing they sat up having their cheap wine every night, even when I was not there, made a difference to me. The same wine that before and after, I would sneak late at night, with friends, lovers intermingling, sneaking around like I was a teenager. They probably always heard and never said.
On a cold late winter day, about 2 weeks before the first day of spring, I was not there. But my father sat out on that front porch, wanting to work, and doing it less and less. But never ceasing. He took a rest, and sat outside, breathing in the crisp, moist mountain air, the same that reminded him of his Croatian youth, which he could not recapture but in his mind and in his stories. He got up and knocked on the front windows. My mother looked out and to this day remembers the scene. A big white butterfly in the midst of upstate winter had landed on my father’s hand and stood there, waiting with him. He lifted his hand up to my mother and smiled. They both probably realized what the messenger meant. But my father, still, did not seem afraid. He never let any fear stop him in all his life and, as for beauty - whether butterfly or tall tale or hammer in his hand or a heart that sang, his had it evermore.
