My Dad As A Young Man c. 1930 - Mary L. Barnard

[Larry Robinson]

My Dad As A Young Man
c. 1930

His father told him to drive the car without the brakes.
He never forgot the thump of the woman landing on the hood

at the corner where he couldn't slow down to turn, she
stepped in front of the grill, the hood ornament a terrible witness.

Over the decades, he said things like, Mary, I couldn't stop.
or I saw a woman crossing the street.  Never the story

beginning middle end.  Either he told me she died or I just knew it.
I played my own scene of what might have happened.

His heart stopped or beat wildly or maybe both.  Brain said
no, No, NO.  He opened the car door, got out, stood upright.

Bright blood on packed white snow.  Felt hat flung far
from her body.  Fur-topped boots without her feet in them.

Screams of her friend sounded far away.  And other cars,
cars with equipment that worked, brakes that worked, stopped.

All the drivers looked like his father, the robust real estate man
glaring through windshields at the son who read aloud from books.

Little details before he could look at her.  A woman he'd never know,
couldn't recognize but who would spend the rest of his life with him.

	- Mary L. Barnard