Ann Chinnis
To My Father on My 67th Birthday
I hated your decoys, the red-breasted
merganser, the blue-winged teal,
the northern pintail you jailed
on your bookshelf. I reviled you
as childish for buckling them
into our station wagon
on the opening day of hunting season,
always
on my Halloween birthday.
At bedtime, I loathed you
for softly drying their rubber
and pine, while forgetting to wish me
Happy Birthday. I loved to twist
a ballpoint pen into the red-headed
canvasback’s belly, to biopsy why
you loved it. On my eighth birthday,
I hounded you to take me hunting.
I wanted to carry your dull
Lesser White Whistling.
I wanted you to look up at the sky,
to say it was the blue of my eyes.
I wanted you to put the top down
on the Cadillac convertible
you spray-painted green and concealed
in the cornfield. I wanted to lie down
in the back seat. I wanted you
to cover me with straw. I wanted
to be one of your
decoys.
I didn’t want to slip on the muck.
I didn’t intend to fall in the river
with your lesser white whistling.
I hugged your decoy
as if it were drowning;
like a mother or father, I never let go.
You yelled: Go wait in the station wagon
until I am done huntin’, as I caught
the car keys you threw at me. I was ashamed
to unlock the car. Mom taught me not
to sit on a seat in wet clothes. I refused
to get in and to turn on the heater,
until I could no longer feel
my toes and my fingers. Even now, Dad,
on a cold day, when I hear a car lock
click open, and I inch onto a vinyl seat—
it feels like losing everything.