Labors of Love

I wrote the poem below about a year after my father's death. In thinking about our time together during his last year, it came to me that the image of playing cards was a perfect one for a poem. My father was excellent at all kinds of card games, and also at most anything else that demanded discipline, a dispassionate assessment of odds, and precision. He liked playing with me, partly because he enjoyed teasing me when I lost. And I lost consistently: I take after him in many ways, but none of them have anything to do with numerical skill.

Mirroring the gift he had for counting cards, the poem finds its shape through its numbers. Each new stanza counts either up to or down from seven words; the choice of seven comes from the number of cards in a hand of gin rummy, the game we always played. Making this strict structure worked was a real struggle, for all that the results felt right.

The title to this post, Labors of Love, was originally chosen in reference to the difficulty of making the poem. Only after I first posted did it occur to me that it speaks of the year I describe in the poem far better. Frail, shocked and grieving deeply, Dad soldiered valiantly on for almost exactly a year after my mother's death. He said to me once that he thought Mom wanted him to be brave, and perhaps he sensed as well that his kids would have been devastated had he gone any sooner. Talk about your labors of love.

COUNTING CARDS

Dad
counted cards
instinctively; knew all
my suits and straights,
shaped his own hand perfectly.
Hearts, you might say, had nothing
to do with these games. These contests
were all head: focused, hands down, cunning,
he won almost always. I dithered,
forgot plays, amassed epic losses.
Schnide, he'd crow, zero.
He never tired
of winning,
though
we
played less
that last year.
TV masked Mom's absence
better, and he breathed easier
on his big reclining couch. Now,
though we never said so, our game
was one of patience, hearts take all,
and I was the stronger player
if only because--not young,
just younger--I still
had the will
to win,
or,
you
might say,
to lose. Pain
always ends life's fight,
that's why we like games
like cards. Dad lived almost exactly
twelve months after Mom's death, then fell
and broke his hip; three days later,
he was gone. How are losses counted,
that break both mind and heart? Deal,
plan, shape; break, win
lose; play
on.

© Suzanne Fox 2007