Green Permanent

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations

so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into

the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — 

you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down

into your father’s basement workroom to look for the right

size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front

door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine,

you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he

must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see

the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools,

the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets,

the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them

like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a

miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick

in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves,

their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and

tapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed

by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing

machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts

still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes,

gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts,

the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words

in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words,

and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybe

more like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence.

With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes,

still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school

of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge

with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth

and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no

choice but to understand the power of creation running through

the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around

for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked

Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes

of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both

the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.