Tracks
Dad used to spend all his time driving trains
back and forth from Thayer. Mom told me
tales about how she’d seen him passing through
and she honked and waved and he smiled
that big smile, said he’d be home Thursday
after he dropped ten thousand tons of coal
off at the Arkansas border.
He was always leaving, coming back, leaving,
but it was Mom who finally left when
she smelled the whiskey iced tea he always
drank while she was watching us, their toddler twins.
He was forced to choose, but he denied
his alcoholism until he failed Burlington Northern’s
random drug test, but by then we were long gone.
They gave him another chance, and he sat through
AA meetings until he’d regained their trust.
He replaced the whiskey in his forty-four
ounce Git N’ Go cup with Hawaiian Punch,
which I always drank during the few weekends
when his work schedule allowed me to see him.
When he failed his drug test a second time
nearly ten years later, they left him, too;
he was forced into spending more time in his house
on Poplar Lane, where I was a phone call
and twenty minutes away.
But he rarely called, and I always answered,
but I was always too busy, always swamped
in academic success and extracurriculars.
He’d run out of excuses; he had nowhere
to go anymore, nowhere to hide from
the daughters he never got the chance to know.
I always wished I could’ve seen him
do what he was proud of; I wanted to get
stopped at the tracks in the woods by Mom’s
house and see him waving, hear him whistling
and calling out my name, saying he’ll see
me soon, just as soon as he’s back in town.
I imagined him inviting me to ride with him
like he said I could when I was younger.
He’d be sitting on his iron throne, dressed
in his black jeans and steel-toed boots and flannel,
ready to tour my unknown and his familiar.
Maybe we’d go on his old routes to Nebraska,
where Mom was born. I could sip his Hawaiian
Punch while he smokes his Winstons, and I could
watch him be happy and successful,
and maybe I could be proud.
Instead, he never calls, and I never call,
and I never visit and he never asks me to,
because we’re both too tired of trying
and neither of us know what to say, anyway.
