My father passed away from lung cancer at the age of 64 ten years ago today. In that time I’ve become a husband and a father. And while I know he would have enjoyed celebrating those life changes with me, it’s in the mundane, everyday moments that I miss my father most.

I wish I could pick up the phone, call him and talk to him about the surface topics of conversation that most fathers and sons banter about—news, sports and the weather. I wish I could have coffee with him while watching him read the newspaper or pick his lottery numbers while sitting in the cramped kitchen of my grandmother’s small brick house in Rome, New York (now owned by someone else).

I don’t have any profound words to offer about my dad today. I just want to honor his memory and tell him how much I miss him.

Over the years, I’ve written a few poems about my father. Here are a few:

The Galliano Club

From street-level sunlight to cavernous darkness,
then down a few steps and you enter The Galliano Club.
Cigar smoke wafts in the air above a cramped poker table.
Scoopy, Fat Pat and Jules are stationed there,
along with Dominic, who monitors it all,
pacing pensively with fingers clasped behind his back.

A pool of red wine spilled on the glossy cherry wood bar,
matches the hue of blood splattered on the bathroom wall.
A cracked crucifix and an Italian flag loom above,
as luck is coaxed into the club with a roll of dice and a sign of the cross.

Pepperoni and provolone are piled high for Tony’s boys,
who man the five phone lines and scrawl point spreads
on thick yellow legal pads.
Bocce balls collide as profanity whirls about . . .
and in between tosses, players brag about cooking calamari.

Each Sunday, after St. John’s noon Mass,
my father strolls across East Dominick Street and places his bets,
catapulting his hopes on the shoulder pads of
Bears, Bills, Packers and Giants.
His teams never cover and he’s grown accustomed to losing . . .
as everything in Rome, New York exacts a toll,
paid in working class weariness and three feet of snow.

But once inside The Galliano, he feels right at home,
recalling his heritage, playing cards with his friends.
And here he’s no longer alone, as all have stories of chronic defeat.
Blown parlays, slashed pensions and wives sleeping around,
constitute the cries of small-town men
who have long given up on their out-of-reach dreams.

For now, they savor the moment—
a winning over/under ticket, a sip of Sambuca
and Sunday afternoons shared in a place all their own.

Outskirts of Intimacy (Flutter Press, 2010)

Open Heart

My father was born
with a hole in his heart,
and although repaired,
nothing in his life,
ever filled it up.
The defect remained,
despite the surgeon’s work—
a void, a place I could never touch.

Outskirts of Intimacy (Flutter Press, 2010)

Death Mask

Assume the death mask,
Put on your final face
Like those insolent characters
In that Twilight Zone episode—you know the one,
With their cruel faces contorted and fixed there for all time’s sake.

My father wore his death mask.
He kept it on even though I arrived after his passing
On that soft warm August evening.
I’ll never forget the way he looked,
With his mouth agape, eyes vacant, cheeks sunken,
Body withered and shriveled,
Curled up in the fetal position on his soiled deathbed
In my grandmother’s sweltering death house.

I allowed myself to look at him for just a moment.
I then turned around and left him alone in his small bedroom.
I did this for my benefit, since I wanted to remember him
As a father and a man and not as a corpse in a locked-up state.
This is because the death mask grips its lonely victim
And sucks out the life and extinguishes the person.

I shuffled into the living room,
Rejoining the Hospice nurse and the neighbors who came
Across the street to comfort my grandmother and express remorse.
And my grandmother—
Still acting as host despite the occasion and the heat—
Asked me to make a pot of coffee for her guests.
The neighbors sat on the old, out-of-style couches and chairs
In my grandmother’s ranch home off Turin Road in north Rome.
They conversed in hushed tones and sipped coffee
While we waited for the workers from the funeral parlor
To drive up to the house and wheel away my father.

Outskirts of Intimacy (Flutter Press, 2010)

St. Peter’s Cemetery

I extend a hand to touch an angel trapped in marble.
Its face is cool and damp, like the earth beneath the slab.
I pose a question to my deceased father,
Knowing the answer will elude me.
For his remains are not buried in this cemetery,
But instead rest on a shelf in my sister’s suburban Ohio house.

Outskirts of Intimacy (Flutter Press, 2010)

Vestiges

My parents are gone.
They walk the earth no more,
both succumbing to lung cancer,
both cremated and turned to ash.

With each passing year,
their images become more turbid in my mind,
as if their faces are shielded
by expanding gray-black clouds.
I try to retain what I remember—
my father’s deep-set, dark eyes and aquiline nose,
my mother’s small head bowed in thought or prayer
while smoking a cigarette in the kitchen.

I search for their eyes
in the constellations of the night sky.
I listen for their voices in the wind.
Is that Rite Aid plastic bag snapping in the breeze
the voice of my father whispering,
letting me know he’s still around . . .
somewhere . . . over there?
Does the squawking crow
perched in the leafless maple tree
carry the voice of my mother,
admonishing me for wearing a stained sweater?

Resorting to a dangerous habit,
I use people and objects as “stand-ins”
for my mother and father,
seeking in these replacements
some aspect of my parents’ identities.

A sloping, two-story duplex with cracked green paint
embodies the spirit of my father saddled with debt,
playing the lottery, hoping for one big payoff.
I want to climb up the porch steps and ring the doorbell,
if only to discover who resides there.

In a grocery store aisle on a Saturday night
I spot an older woman
standing in front of a row of Duncan Hines cake mixes.
With her short frame, dark hair, and glasses,
she casts a similar appearance to my mother.
She is scanning the labels,
perhaps looking for a new flavor,
maybe Apple Caramel, Red Velvet, or Lemon Supreme,
just something different to bake
as a surprise for her husband.
A feeling strikes me and
I wish to claim her as my “fill-in” mother.
I long to reach out to this stranger in the store,
fighting the compulsion
to place a hand on her shoulder
and tell her how much I miss her.

I fear that if my parents disappear
from my consciousness,
then I too will become invisible.
And the reality of a finite lifespan sets in,
as I calculate how many years I have left.
But I realize I am torturing myself
with this twisted personification game.
I must remember my parents are dead
and possess no spark of the living.
And I can no longer enslave them in my mind,
or try to resurrect them in other earthly forms.
I have to let them go.
I have to dismiss the need for physical ties,
while holding on to the memories they left behind.

And so on the night I see the woman
in the grocery store aisle,
I do not speak to her,
and she does not notice me lurking nearby.
But as I walk away from her,
I cannot resist the impulse to turn around
and look at her one last time—
just to make sure
my mother’s “double” is still standing there.
I want her to lift her head and smile at me,
but she never diverts her eyes
from the boxes of cake mixes lining the shelf.

Sidewalk Stories (Kelsay Books, 2017)