Father’s Day
Remember the tree house?
I suppose that was less us
than perhaps the music
at church, or the car—my bad,
bad cars. But remember anyway.
There were the grass fires
we saw when I was young.
You don’t know this yet, but
I’ve written about them,
the smell of smoke and vanilla.
The business trips you took
us on. The short stories said
while waiting at the post office.
How you tried to convince us
that camping was fun; it was
in retrospect. The tree house,
hung from an ageless pine,
provided a new perspective
on everything I saw from ground-
level, our whole backyard.
—David K. Wheeler, from Contingency Plans
T.S. Poetry Press, 2010
