What he thought belly down, when I was 8 years old

What he thought belly down, face down on the beige speckled tile floor, new wax, drill holes where desks had been anchored. Of the shield-thick hovering air. He could be a ribbon of wax, a thin trail of caulk. Something left over above his breath and heart sounds he could hear waiting like a hymn and pipe organs’ stop just before release.

What he thought belly down, face down on the ice sliding between cars toward the gutter. Of the rifle smug and steady at his forehead and jittery sawed-off rushing his wife for her wedding rings. Of the streetlight shadow. The hydrant hunched in the snow-crusted grass. The salted walk. His little girl mid-step on the porch and the rod-iron storm door and front door ajar.

When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a monster.
When I was 8 years old I thought my father could fly.
When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a dark room
In a dark house with walls of eyes and teeth and banisters of thick
     rough skin.
The rooms around him were also monsters and they were tall
As telephone poles with flesh of kerosene and black fire.
Their arms were always open and they surrounded my father,
Keeping him warm for as long as he chose to stand on the
     earth
Watching me.

Copyright © 2021 by Duriel E. Harris. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 8, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Moving alongside ‘What he thought belly down, when I was 8 years old’ even as it came forth into language, was the evolving image of love’s ‘offices.’ Accompanying the eloquence of Robert Hayden’s memorable phrasing in ‘Those Winter Sundays,’ were verses seven and twenty-six of the twenty-third chapter of the biblical book Proverbs. Explicitly, in the King James version, these verses read: ‘For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he’ and ‘My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.’ With this counsel, for me the following questions also emerge: What anchors the phenomena unfolding in the interior of being? By what route does the daughter find herself in her father’s heart? By what mechanism does she find the father’s heart in the chambers of her own?”
—Duriel E. Harris