Two Poems - Cottingham

 

 

Dale Cottingham

TO MY FATHER

America, its threads

of half breeds, multi-breeds, entwines—

tenement dwellers in Chicago

or sharecroppers

in west Arkansas

braiding 

backroads amid thieves

and flimflams,

stitched into uneven fields

hardpan in summer

frozen in winter 

wearing hard sermons

of lakes of fire

and damnation

like homespun 

that adjured them

to subdue and multiply

where they bred large families

my father one, a mechanic,

who sits at our table telling

of his grandmother, Mary,

half Choctaw 

whose parents were 

force-migrated from Mississippi,

Mary, torn from her homeland,

who resisted the warp and weft

even refusing to ride in cars—

the hair on dad’s hands

worn off

by solvent 

from washing car parts 

but the twine of his life

could not be washed—

and neither can ours,

our family of librarians, 

lawyers, engineers,

we are obscure

we are destined to be deprived

of a homeland we never knew

as August

burns 

outside

These are  

the clothes 

we wear

No one 

to take them off 

no one to unweave the weave


RECOVERY WARD

We had February to handle.

That pullout couch? I never asked you

how it made it into the landscape or

what music you heard in your head

during the lulls between class and apartment.

In this careless way we let what happened happen.

You cut gin with Kool Ade.

We both rode on the sled.

Not good or bad, we bleached out the fabric

we’d woven between us.

I never saw you after that.

Now it’s All Saints Day and in Sienna 

they’ve brought out relics of local saints.

Evening closes the day earlier. The yellowing trees

have a story too: a history 

in leaves dying on their limbs.  

It’s regret again, how the lunar year went all too fast, 

watching that couple in the piazza, 

then slipping off to bed, alone again, to sleep

and to my dreams that swirl,

still trying to recover, still feeling

the curve of the myth you lent.



Dale Cottingham has published poems and reviews of poetry collections in many journals.  Dale is a Breadloafer and won the 2019 New Millennium Award for Poem of the Year. His debut collection is in circulation for a publisher. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.