Reading the 1969 Almanac to My Father

The male nurse—the one we don’t trust.

{*Like a poisonous flower. Nerium oleander. Wolfbane in Dostoyevsky glasses.}    

Knock knock? he asks as he enters.  

My father wanes.

My father’s posture while attended to in bed: broken candelabra.

Mickey Mantle, my father says from a corner of his mouth.      

The Commerce Comet, I say.

He likes to wash dishes there, he says.

Where ‘there’? I say.

We sit at a table by the coffee dispenser in the facility’s dinette.

My father juts his chin. Re-juts. Neck-craning. Communicating with birds. His lips keep moving.  

My father is passing through last doors in his memory.

Feast of Cocked Hats.

Holy Smell of Turpentine at Train Yard.

Bread of Fleshly Desires.

Bread of Troubled Gums.

He opens his mouth and stretches his lips to invite his teeth to jump.

Apollo 11. The tallest building in Akron, Ohio. Broadway Joe Namath.

O Renamer, rename him.

Do you remember Bo Schembechler? I ask him.   

He looks at me like a man he’s meeting on a bridge.