DAMN

Momma dominates conversations unless
Daddy interjects an important point, like
Beavers.
Age has given his voice a permanent hoarseness
As if his throat is always dry.
Beavers, he raspily repeats.

Beavers are conducting their busy beaver business,
gnawing down thin trees,
stealthily, industriously adding
a brushy housing development to the dam
Daddy bulldozed years ago.
Fascinated with their new tenants,
Josie slowly sneaks, as her ancestors did,
crouched with primal shepard paws carefully placed
moving silently toward
the twigged thatched projects.
With whacks of ping pong paddle tails,
the beavers sound the alarm, halt work, dive,
splash and hide.

Every day when Josie and I slip back to check on them,
I wish you were with us, honey.

That sentence nearly breaks the dam
of pent up emotion.
That one line is flooded with
his heartaches for our decades-long separation.
I hear him breathe across the phone line,
as I recall spending splendid days with Daddy in silence except
for occasional one-word commands,
such as, Look, to point out a brown-eyed doe curled around
twin fawns nearly hidden in the undergrowth,
or, Listen, as a V of geese honk their way overhead,
or, Here, as his leathery capable hands
demonstrate the best way to cinch a saddle.
Momma interrupts our silence with family news.
Never again can I think of beavers
without hearing that muffled wail of sorrow in
my Daddy’s thinning voice. Damn.


Patricia Prewitt
December 10, 2008