Poem: Cobwebs

I breathe into my hands and turn the keys to get the Chevy warming,
waiting for Dad’s thick denim profile to emerge from the house.
When it does he’s grasping a mug, and bending his mouth
to where the coffee has burned him, crossing the empty space of the garage,
his hard features framed by a cobweb in the corner:
its freshly spun threads shining in the cool morning light.
I watch as he approaches and at the last moment swats it down with his hat,
afterwards climbing half-heartedly behind the steering wheel.
I shift his bagged lunch to keep him from sitting on it and catch myself
staring abstractly at the mangled web, waiting for the reverse gear to sound.

But we are still.

I turn to find that his eyes too are trained on the ruined structure,
or looking past it, foggy and indistinct like pools of milk.
“Godammit,” he says at last in a voice raspy with sleep.
“Build it there and of course it’ll be wrecked by morning.”
And I say nothing; just sit silently for a moment and wait
for the laborious pound of the reverse gear to sound.
When finally it does, he clutches the back of my seat and scans the driveway
behind us, and on his cheek I can see this faint glistening- a single shining stream-
then watch him turn into his dirty sleeve as we shift into drive,
waiting for the glare to erase him as we accelerate beneath the risen light.