My Father's First Fight

              Coated with blood, he canters home
              waving his blue fists in victory.

              His siblings want to sponge his knee,
              lay a steak on his eye, call Dr. Gianni
              to suture the cut on his cheek.

              But he needs his father to see him
              like some bloated big-time boxer
              who made the other guy look worse.

              Only eleven, he brags his opponent was fifteen.
              His mother enters; hands and hair full of flour.
              She collapses in mist into a chair.

              One of his sisters fans her
              using the newspaper, the dog barks
              at the fresh scab on the tip of her brother's ear.

              Wiping his brow with her apron,
              his mother fusses for a towel
              but he leaps from her fingers
              shouting Papa! Papa!  And from the belly

              of his study his father puts down his bills,
              steps to the stairwell and frowns
              at his baby's swollen features.

              He waves his whole arm in a backhand gesture
              that turns his body away from his youngest son.

              At the closed door, the women
              resume their hovering, sponging,
              cooing, the flutter of care
              a weepy blur to the Roman
              warrior robbed of his honor.


              Deborah DeNicola

     

              *         *          *
        

              about the poem:

              "This is one of a series of poems I've written exploring 
              my father's psychology. He died when I was an adolescent and it 
              is only as an adult that I've begun to come to terms with who he 
              was and his influence on me. The poem narrates a story my mother 
              told me which my father had told her about his own pre-adolescence. 
              I took the license to re-imagine the household where my father 
              was the youngest and over-protected. It is in my newest manuscript, 
              Oracle of the Body."



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