Sport 38: Winter 2010
Song
Song
Sometimes I want to tell my father things
like how forgiveness and forgetting
look the same
or how I always write palace
when I mean place.
That I remember when he would take
me to Jellicoe Park and I thought
the water in the adults'
pool was blue.
When I was older
I dived into the bottom
opened my eyes and saw
it was just painted onto
the floor and the walls
that the water was see through
the whole time.
Sometimes I want to tell him how
netball and swimming made me ace,
that's when I stopped being an alien.
That I remember him laying
out the wallpaper on a trestle table,
sloshing the paste onto the back of it,
then pressing it up against the wall
and rubbing it down with his hand
tilting his head one way then the next
to make sure all the little boats
on the pattern were straight.
And when he came to school
on race day, every time I looked
up to take a breath I could see him
running alongside me on the edge of the pool.
I couldn't hear what he was saying
but it looked like he was singing.