Lew Forester

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Moonlight and Ashes

Father, alone in the backyard
after dark, smoking a cigarette,
the lengthening ash glowing red.
He didn’t know I watched him
from my bedroom window.
A gibbous moon walked its tightrope
of sky to the gossiping of leaves,
assembled loneliness of crickets.

At twelve, I’d begun to study him,
like some tattered guide to manhood.
He’d shown me his Purple Heart,
though never would speak of the men
whose lives he ended in the war—
but with each inhale of a cigarette,
he seemed to breathe for them, keep
them alive within. My many fathers
swirled in the smoke around him,
the varied expressions on his face.

I once overheard him and a neighbor,
who startled at the sound of closing
doors, speak of how rivers ran red,
like veins slashed open in the earth.
Then they’d go quiet, biting their lips,
speaking only with bloodshot eyes.

Father stared hard at the hooded moon,
as if to blame it for all the madness
poured into flesh. Like the moon,
the closer I tried to get, the more
he seemed to recede, as if not wanting
to have the kind of man he was
for a son. I observed from a distance
as he lit another cigarette— ghosts
in the smoke, ash lingering.