Elevator

My hands still tremble
sometimes at the drop
of a voice, Dad’s disapproval
Not To dialect.

I am in the port of Svakia, Crete
alone at a table across
from the local toughs,
like my high school fraternity;
they send me back in time and space.

“Keep away from the moving wall”
the sign on the old Greek elevator
says, when it’s perfectly clear,
not the wall, but we
are moving.

I know, for now, I am my father
sitting worried in fourth grade
openly cheating because, he said, the test
was unfair. Or was his father?
He was liberated by France
and its lovely wine
which he doted on for years.
I am for sweet honeyed yogurt in Greece
rather than the whiskey in
my father’s house in Pittsburgh
as dark as the Monongahela.

But I still shake before I leave
the homestead, even on this trip
to Greece, worry he will
lose the tickets, as when I was 12.
He won’t be the smartest
in his Harvard class, thud, thud
in the crimson.

Now I am the tough boys escaping
their fathers in long draughts
and sweet sucks of tobacco,
hard, quick fights.

I now look up from the mirror
of the computer screen
to the wall mirror above:
I look so like my father;
I am so writing his poems.

We are all together in this elevator,
if standing only on spread
trembling legs, rising and falling.