Showing My Father Through Freedom

His steps rang in the end room
of the henhouse of ten rooms in a row
someone had lent my father as a place
to put the family for the summer
while he stayed behind doing his odd jobs.
This would be his one visit, and I ran
through the dark of the empty rooms
until he bent down out of the gloom like a god
and picked me up and carried me back into the lamplight.
The next day my mother and I showed him through Freedom.
The strawberry ice cream in the Harmony Tea Shop,
which my mother called the Patisserie, was pink
with red bruises. Lettie the postmistress
said, with her sweet regretfulness, perhaps acquired
from palpating whatever billets-doux passed
in or out of Freedom, as she said nearly every day
to one or another of us children, "Nothing today, dear."
John, who pumped gas probably no more
than a dozen times a day, sat back in his chair
under the sign of Pegasus. I ran to him,
to get on the knee where he put me
whenever my mother and I came by, happy
that my father would see this full-grown
man was my friend, and would respect me.
But after he greeted us, John turned and, when he sat again,
leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.
The three of them conversed. My father did his best.
"Yes, it has been," of the wet summer.
"They are sudden," of the lightning storms.
I lingered at the knee. My sitting on it,
and my mother and John talking while I sat,
was that a secret? Suddenly I was like
somebody propped up in a hospital bed,
who can see, hear, almost understand,
and is unable to speak.

Galway Kinnell,
Imperfect Thirst