Lifelines

All my friends are having them: snips
and zips of the pucker and wrinkle. A little off
the eyelids, please. Clip
the sag, make it trim
as my father’s memory.
In his spare cell of time
are an armchair, a pen and a packet
of sticky notes. One or two scribbled sheets
decorate the arm of his chair.
He ignores them until he discovers
that a stranger has been writing him
hieroglyphics. I want to make my face
as economical as his mind: three creases
are all it should have to hold
to mark a lifetime of living. Stick
figure expressive lines, gestures
of smile and frown even my father can read.
I want my face thin-limned
by a sneak, want him to take back the cartoons
he sketches on me while I sleep.
Though, come to think of it, the blank
face is the one my dad turns
to me as I walk in the room – a horrible look
you might get in a bus stop,
until I say, It’s me, Dad, and he grins,
lighting up in a thousand wrinkles the web
we have spun between us, cat’s cradle.

My Father Loses His Remote Control

in his long narration of a mind which now grows dots,
replacing cells. His eyes are as blue as beyond
his ocean-view window. He holds up the thing and asks
why this gray box with yellow buttons has landed
on the table. A small space ship? A cigarette pack?
But he hasn't smoked for thirty years. Before his daughter can reply,
he says perhaps they pack the butts in a single layer.
He upends the rectangle and pushes
its yellow nubs, decides it might be a box of very thin
pencils. She starts to tell him – but is overridden by his
But why they would button a pack of smokes?
Oh, look, it probably works the TV. She is silent
as he points it at the glass-windowed stereo.
When a picture fails to spark, he can still remember to cuss
in French – Cette espece de vieux truc! Dots of spit
land on her arm. You're the Winston girl, right?
She laughs when he says he wants to throw
away all this crap, pointing to the book she gave him
on Fermat's Enigma. He asks if she remembers
her quadratic equations, but before she can say
she majored in English, he tells her why
the ocean's always restless: It's the waves.
He looks over his shoulder, and his deeply teal eyes
blink at the ocean's endless rolling, seem to see
decades trailing away in swells like the dots that now trail
his sentences, blue furrows reaching twenty-six miles
to Catalina Island. He has reached somewhere
he doesn't recognize, but talking, always talking,
he leans into the next What's this?
mystery that starts it all again.