By December with your death not yet a habit,
a box of books arrives that you asked
my sister to pack up for me. On the top
I pull out Raccontini Italiani, open to the dedication
page, notes scrawled in Italian
in your curly cursive, the blue ink
of a felt tip pen now faded. I placed
distance between us that last year, not prepared to let
what was happening to you reach me, just
allowing bits and pieces in, closed
my eyes to things I could not look at head-on, controlling
the itinerary of my visits to Pittsburgh. The catalog
of emotion from your last year disappeared when you died
in early August. Even now I shed the weight
of those memories to live in the present.
I confess I lived a life close off
to you, covered up in my silence, and now would
do anything to replay those years. If only
I had known how to trust
you, coming of age in those Reagan
years, free in the white space to be out far
away from that childhood in rural PA. I suppose
there is never a sense of coming back
to a father, no anchorages. Unpacking this box
on the desk, I hold your favorite books again
in my hands that are now the last of you. I read lines until
I hear your voice as it was in life, leaf through the margins of dog-eared
pages, underlined passages where you penciled
in my name, and I recover you one notation at a time.
About Anthony Botti
