Elegy with a Treble Hook

Ten years, twenty years later, I am still
that child beneath my father’s belt

raised high in the air above his head.
Still waking up each morning to him

ripping my shirt off my back, grabbing
the weight of me from sleep. How long

will it take for my anger to fade? He wasn’t 
always awful. He taught me how 

to fish, how to hold with one hand 
the cricket still wiggling, how to thread it 

onto the hook with the other, how to cast 
the line in the water’s mirrored ripple

and wait. He taught me how to wait 
in that stillness for a bite, then how to set 

the hook. How to reel the fish in, holding 
the line tight. How if the fish had swallowed 

the hook, if the barb was stuck deep inside 
the throat, the fish would die. The fish 

wasn’t dead yet, but would be in hours, 
maybe days. How it wouldn’t be able 

to hold anything but the sharpness 
in its chest. How the fish wasn’t the length 

of his forearm, how it was too small 
to keep, to eat. He taught me how to cut 

the line with his pocket knife. How the fish 
would die, but he taught me how to still 

kneel down and lower the fish gently back 
into the water, how to release him.

Elegy for the Memory of Memory

Since all memory decays, my father 
is hitting me, was hitting me, had been hitting me, 
then denies it as he takes firewood 
from the wood pile, tosses it in the mouth 

of the stove—since even this is nothing 
now but a remembrance of the flames,
I have no way to know if he ever hit me, 
if the fire was ever there, his hand fading 

while still mid-air—or, if he is right, 
the picture frame broke not from him 
hitting it against his desk, but from falling
off a bookshelf, the height of which exists 

now only in my memory, the bookcase 
not holding books, but decorations.