The Assignment

the assignment by (view in gallery and store | image by bruce harris

The other day my 11-year-old son

said his summer reading

has to include metaphors

I said he should write a story instead

Include a father

I will be the father

I will be the metaphor

I AM the father, my wife says

I am and the poor kid is

clearly stamped

His DNA will drag him through forest

preserves

send him chasing tennis balls

until his tongue droops out like

a breathless dog

History religion literature all filled with fathers

Some were alive with beating hearts

and torn meaty skin

Some were ideals of imagined

faith and tests of the same

Some heard mortar’s deathly knell

echoing forever in their ears

like the sea in a shell

Some were myths of command or dying

humbled and hung

I wondered about metaphors

Can a metaphor eat and breathe

can it believe and bleed

can a metaphor intoxicate and spill

vials of pills while scrambling for

morning relief

A father with a hangover

probably not the story my son should tell

He should write a story about a stone

that the world smashes to bits and

reforms, how it tumbles to shore smooth

as skin, finds itself gripped in his palm

and flung out whirling and skipping across

the water at dusk

He should write a story of a man walking

near a cliff’s edge

his arms reaching out to balance over

the breach

He should write a story of a man

lifting a boy into the sunshine

spinning until they wobble and fall

laughing like idiots

He should write that he wanted to write

a story about being a father but

he should say it’s impossible

to describe