Footwork

by Michael Dwayne Smith

My father leaned on bars like

            Nureyev tipped on floors.

                        It was a certain grace: a red

            rag body

slipped and poured into

            furniture—

fixed or laughing, pissed or dancing,

            the little shit could flick a jab with his left

            quicker’n you could think.

It was goddam

ballet: spin around the stools and

            work the crowd,

jokes and hands and pinch an ass

            and here the drinks’d come. Flatter

the fat woman, flirt with

            the fag in the overdone eyes,

                        Dad was

King For A Day, scotch and blowjobs for life,

            bobbing and weaving,

                        flipping the pages

of his encyclopedic brain, where he’d recorded

            every racist joke

                        he’d ever heard.

But trading one drink for three

            was his specialty. “Always buy

                        first,”

he’d tell me, “serve with bullshit buddy-speak

            and machismo drool.”

                        And just to keep the

            timing right, he’d kick

the occasional fight. “Keeps gas in the tank,

            n’ smoke in the eye,” he’d say.

The burning day I

            busted his face, reeling around

            from behind the rust-red pump

                        at a Vegas filling station,

he dropped to the pavement and smiled like

I'd arrived.  He lept to his feet,

paid cash for the fuel,

and in the viscous heat,

for the first time in years, he called me

Son.  The toothless

attendant laughed

in the swirling sand, waved the ragged bills

as we sped away.

And in the red of the blood of my father's eye,

I saw the sad choreography of it all:

one movement

making necessary the next,

the hard logic

of ignorant pain,

the strained chorus of loss, the tragic

gravity of

cuts and glass and falling down drunk

and stinking sex—

we drove for hours without a word.

We met again in Barstow, several months later,

in a gritty lounge from a noir film,

his face a relief in shadow and stone.

He had the cancer then, but didn’t know.

Mother

            traveled with him,

drinking gin, alone, again—

a trembling rabbit, in a black corner booth.

She watched, shitfaced, seated in yet another

smoke and dim theater,

a stage where nightly he’d performed, forever.

                        The old man

was artful. Knew his audience well. He’d learned

            to lean his bones in a

carcinogen wind

                        and dance,

and dance, until he fell.