Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

My Father Runs

Tonight my father was not the cat that I did not run over. He ran across two lanes of traffic, fur white in front and back, a black band around his middle. A middle that draped low and dragged. He was ragged from the rain. The first drizzling rain of this warmest of Januaries. The light changed. Red to green. Day to twilight. The light changed. The car’s wheels spun patterns that flowed into nothing as soon as they were made, the light pouring out of the ground and up into the air and the cat that was not my father ran. When I turned left he was still alive. Halfway across the four lanes total. None of the other cars stopped for the cat that was not my father. And of course I did not look back. There would have been no point.

My Father Wishes Me Sweet Dreams

When I answer the phone I know it’s him even though we haven’t spoken in fifteen years that time’s erased as if this silence on the phone line has always been there at the edge of my hearing the frequencies where wind hisses through the small cracks of the rocks we used to climb him pushing me up from behind telling me that he didn’t care how much my fingers bled telling me that he didn’t care if I fell onto him because he would catch me and we would fall together telling me that he didn’t care one way or another but why not forget about my bloody fingers that were too slippery and make a fist and wedge that into the space between the rocks and while the wind tried to make of us mince meat whispering through the gaps in the cliff how much easier falling would be than this nonsense of father and son and then he stopped speaking or pushing and left me hanging by one fist while he loped one of his long legs off to the right to latch onto a hold I could never have made and when I crawled into camp and found him placing a marshmallow onto the blackened sharpened ends of sticks all he asked was what had taken me so fucking long as he handed me my spear the charred sweetness squared onto its tines and now after the fifth ring when I pick up and there’s no voice I know him from his absence and then he says that he knows me too that he’s been watching me that he’s been pushing my cells apart that he’s been here all along inside each moment pushing with all of his might as if he were gravity as if he were the mountain trying to get between every moment of my life to make me have to reach for even the simplest of connections to make me have to ball up my bloody fist on the one hand and on the other offer my open palm for him to pluck off the marshmallows from the fire and drop onto my palm and if I yelped then there was nothing for me and he would take his large hands and close them over mine the blood and marshmallow mixing in my palms and squeezing out the sides while he laughed saying that he knew all along I’d be OK that I was his son and that he’d never lost a son yet and on the phone the silence spirals the way the milky stars in the sky spiraled over our campfire and he took a burning brand from the coals and sketched brilliant patterns in the air and said to me and the air and stars that I would never go there that I would never go anywhere that he would make sure of it that I was his and that was the best thing for me and anyway what the fuck there was another mountain tomorrow and to go to sleep already because we were breaking camp at daybreak.

A black and white photograph by Patrick Scott Vickers James river shore trees, while walking with Gregory Kimbrell on my 42nd birthday.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with white and black charcoal.