Cynthia Dewi Oka
For My Father Who Once Rubbed Shoe Polish Over His Bald Head
She said not to say anything, because it gave you hope, which
reminds me, here is the world
you cannot enter. Though you brought us, against
the wishes of the bougainvillea, grown in clay
pots arranged like soldiers between your daughters and the wrought
iron gate on the other side of which dogs
unleashed, licked themselves to sleep. I envy
sometimes, these days, their mud-hardened coats, shaved
as I am to a worry over my shrinking Antarctic
of time. No, it’s not even that. The poem I should have
written by now, I mean. What was sliding around inside you, all
those years: my painted face speaking English
as though it never knew another purpose, while you
knelt beside a creaseless bed, a man
reduced to nothing but hours. Oh, you kept
yourself busy. Cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, tying
my mother’s shoelaces on the steps of the bus. But purpose?
That is a word for everything we have not
yet found the strength to cast away. It must have been
terrifying, your child, her thin wave
through the florescent walls of a McDonald’s, on the first shift of her
first job. You waited and waited. For me
to come back, for anyone
to say, you are not done yet.
And while you waited, other things happened. Eggs
spoiled. Mirrors rusted. A child
thought herself a dog, and the rain clapped. I don’t
to this day, question your version of events. When your grandson was
little, my body attacked the hair on my head. It
fell in fistfuls, until I was half-
lunar. I felt close to understanding, then, why you did
what you did. He is sixteen now, and refusing
to cut his. All night I hear him talk with no one I can see
in a world I cannot enter. He is not worrying about getting a job.
He doesn’t say, leave me be. Clamps
headphones over the black grass, just like I once
did, in my greasy uniform, not
recognizing you, then
not holding my laughter. Pa,
it wasn’t that you hurt me. You did. It was that you tried and kept
trying to do what you thought a father should. So that
gripping the wheel
with both hands, you picked me up
that night the moon was more touchable than any country,
from my first shift at my first job, like a man who hasn’t been
shedding himself in the dark. So that
right then, looking away from you, my whole world was
smooth, not a single blade survived.
Cynthia Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket). Recent work appears in Tupelo Quarterly, The Undefeated, Zocalo Public Square, PRISM International, and Scoundrel Time. Originally from Bali, Indonesia, she’s currently based in the Greater Philadelphia Area and teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College.