The Postman

Postman

When they told me how you also
spent fifteen years as a Postman
trapped in the belly of a train,
thousands of miles from your family,
I guess I finally understood why
there was nothing gentle about your hands.

I imagine it was because of how many countless stories slipped through them
licked, gummed shut, paper cut and postmarked
to adventures you would never get to taste.

But still, you held so much:
parachute pull strings, pilot control boards, defeated brother’s metals.
What happened to the candy maker that use to shape
peanut brittle, and Christmas canes, and yards of perfectly kneaded multi-colored taffy with those hands? You held nine children for as long as they would let you.

I wish I didn’t know with the memory of my own skin
how you hands turned dirty, leathered, and tanned
across the perfect smooth hide
of three generations of women,
two the fruit of your own desire,
the other the woman you swore to protect
in sickness and in health.
Did you not realize
that meant even if you were the disease that had to be destroyed?

I wonder if anyone every asked you the way.
Or, if like me, your eyes were always downcast
to track footprints in the dust.

You gave in.
At night, on the trains
your only palatable ration came to you polluted.
Your lungs filled with clouds of opaque coal dust
that layered over and over
until they forgot their true color.
Between every breath stolen in an effort
to cough up and hack up and throw up
your malignant tar crusted capillaries,
you had to take five more in, just to survive.

I want you to know
I don’t believe anyone can ever be all one thing or the other.
I understand
It is so much easier to drown
than to swim.

When they told me how you used to return home
your hands too raw to hold the baby,
too rough to gently run along your young wife’s back,
I understood, like you did,
that sometimes to protect
can also mean to make promises you know you can’t keep,
to learn to breath in the coal dust
so that between breaths you can look up
to see all that burning color.

When you died, I did not cry because my heart was breaking.
I cried because it sighed with relief
to see your weary fist finally drop
just so I could loosen my grip.