When my father was seventy-four
and I was no longer a girl that cowered,
skirting the edge of the room,
I asked him to travel back to his childhood,
the landscape he’d banished for years.
He became an Amish boy in suspenders,
hitching the horse to the buggy,
driving Delaware’s back country roads
past the red chokeberries lining the ditches,
chickadees darting from hawthorn trees.
He remembered the bitternut hickory
and showed me the fence rows
he walked every Sunday,
the sweet gum tree with its star-shaped leaves,
the wounds he and Rudy carved in its bark.
He followed the oaks along sandy lanes
back to the farm north of Dover,
back to the small mother in her black stockings,
bending over the zinnias,
hoeing the sweet peas.
Now that his body knew it was dying,
he longed to return
to a white-blossomed orchard, a garden
where he first emerged,
turned his desire toward a bright world,
no knowledge, no memory,
no bitter fruit.