Autobiography of a Father in Six Photos

1.
The day after he marries Mama, he leans
back on the broadside of a 1960 Pontiac
with a tail as long as his spine is tall.
His right hand curls around his bride’s waist,
his left dangles a smoke with a nonchalance
not yet lost.

2.
He lies on the frost-cold carpet
with the Winnipeg Trib, reading emotions
he doesn’t know how to feel. Beside him
wiggles his third-born—a babe whose
peachy forearms crumple the news.
It’s not a story worth telling because it’s Sunday
and he don’t go to church, but baby does.

3.
He wears a John Deere cap, snap-back, flat brim
shading hazels. His half-hidden Brylcreem hair—
slick like the wax-shine on a crop-ready
combine—longs to escape. He tells her he needs
something from town, but Mama knows
that what he needs is to slink off to the pub
before the harvest sews him to the land.

4.
It’s the last supper in the field on the last harvest
on the farm: Mama stands ankle-deep in stubble,
her arms reach up the combine’s steep steps,
offer a bog-coloured lunchbox to his wide smile
and waiting hand—a prairie installation of the
Creation of Adam on the ceiling of an endless sky.

5.
An oxygen tube hangs like a noose
around his neck. Noctambulant ramblings
from his extra-long bed to the street-lit couch
are his drives to the pub now. Mama tiptoes
over the cord that carries his breath
and makes him grape-jelly toast.

6.
His wheat-engraved headstone, installed yesterday,
sits in the foreground. In the background—half an acre
north of the cemetery and leaning like a makeshift cross—
is their first house: the one with the cold floors, the one
that neighbours will bulldoze tomorrow.

There is no mnemonic for grief. We sew
the stories we can harvest.