My Dad
The Toenail
I found the toenail of the truth in a pile of oyster shells behind a restaurant.
The truth is immense, And so is its toenail.
Like a shovel’s translucent blade, the toenail barely fits in my leather satchel.
Whenever I encounter a head-scratching question, I unbuckle the satchel and ask for help.
It’s dark in there; I can barely see, but I can hear the drumming.
I lean in, but the toenail is sharp, and soon my cheek is bleeding.
“Do you promise to tell the truth,” I asked, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“How can I?” came the reply. “I’m the toenail, just a part of the truth.”
It wants to be reunited with its toe. It pulls me this way and that,
left when I want to turn right, straight when I want to go back.
I never knew the truth could be so much trouble.
By now, I’m used to it squirming like a cat in my satchel.
Better a piece of the truth than no truth at all.
Film Noir
We were watching a black-and-white Philip Marlowe on a color TV on a hot August night in Baltimore when the screen and living-room lights blinked off. Light then darkness, like a prophecy. Darkness in every room in the house. Darkness in every house in the neighborhood. Darkness and no idea where we stored the candles and flashlights.
With the light of our cellphones, with fear and courage, we go searching through a house suddenly invisible. Kitchen junk drawer? No. Upstairs linen closet? No. Pantry shelf by the mousetraps? Bingo. But the candles need matches, and the flashlights need batteries, and the search continues.
Batteries are found, and one flashlight actually works. “Turn your phone off,” she says, “and save the battery.” I plunge into the basement, sweeping aside cobwebs with my left arm, and find the breaker panel in the non-working basement bathroom. Flip all the breakers off. Flip all the breakers on. Darkness remains. Circumstances are beyond our control.
We sit at the dining room table, two tapered candles flickering between, a romantic scene, perhaps, but not a romantic situation. Our faces hover in the shadows, two moons hovering in the sky, attracted by the gravity of knowing separated by the centrifugal force of not knowing.
El Presidente Mosquito
Even when the sun comes out, the flood continues to attack us. After the monsoon, the swollen tributary receded to stepping stones of puddles. A month later, from the puddles rise electrified clouds of mosquitos with needles sharp as razors, plump with our blood and hungry for more.
Even when the tyrant is overthrown, he assails us still. We seek asylum in the mountain jungle. We climb the switchback trails into a grove of ginger and coconut, coffee and creeper vines, but at every altitude the silhouettes of armed men and the buzzing of insects.