Centering the Tree
Every Christmas my father centered the tree like he was trying to center the world, tying it with silver guide wires from every shadow. Every night he built arks and Alamos in the basement, pounding them into sense, his head prickled with dreams and sawdust as that house closed in around him. That house unbalanced levels, swallowed nails, resisted very tool with a groan, dropping plaster snowflakes that aged him. We pounded and nailed until we crucified that house and still it resisted, sending down plagues of spiders and moths and hoarding like heirlooms its silences, filth. Late at night he read under a cone of hungry light no wider than a dove, his huge hands smoothing the pages, his lips chanting the reluctant dawn. He hid his diaries on the highest shelf but I could climb those bruised walls like a spider, found his childhood pressed in flyleaves, all his dusty dreams bound tight in imitation gold. Chicago, Winter '34, family evicted seven times for rent, furniture pitched in the street like some obscene excretion, and the father who abandoned them sent fat boxes of lusty fruit with no return addresses. Slowly, our house and its stories wore down my father until his fingers could not clutch a nail, until his hands shivered like frightened birds and finally, it devoured him, his exhausted breaths ghosting into plaster, his tired bones bending into balustrades, his eyes the dusty high windows. One day, I found my home again in piles of pulverized wood and bone. Carefully, I sorted through the mess, salvaging beams, unbending nails, and weaving the guide wires around my veins, sat down to build.