Poetry Contest
International Poetry Competition
Grand Prize Winner: 2009
Grip
by Michael Lee Phillips
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Home Pond
The Grand Canyon, mid fifties. My father
stops my brother and me on the descent of
Bright Angel trail. A stranger has approached
asking him for a light. My father strikes
a match against a granite rock and cups
the flame with his hands—the good one
that will hold steady as any rock nearly into
his eighties, and the bad one, the one
that took splinters from a fir tree that exploded
next to him in the Hürtgen Forest in the
winter of ’44. That hand will shake and
twitch until the end, and anyone taking hold
of it, as my brother and I would often
that day, would feel the crosshatching
of scars left when all the deep splinters
were removed. My father and this man
will talk there on the trail, smoking
their unfiltered cigarettes. They will step
politely aside for the touristed burros
and solemn hikers bound for the river.
My brother and I will grow impatient
and misbehave, forcing my father’s attention
by throwing rocks at hikers on the trail
loop below us. My father and the man
will shake hands, not with the bad hand,
but with my father’s good hand, the one
that could crush a steel beer can by itself.
That same evening the man will visit
our room on the second floor of the Twilite
Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona. That motel
is still there, on Route 66. Never have I driven
past without seeing my father and this man
on the balcony, smoking and talking. I remember
the funny way the man held his cigarette,
between thumb and forefinger, his hand
with the palm up. My brother asked my mother
why the man talked funny, and she said hush
and reached into a big canvas bag and asked us
which comics we wanted to read before bedtime.
The next morning the sun rising over Gallup,
New Mexico, would wake us in the station wagon,
the voices up front edgy with thermos coffee,
our mother saying the boys are awake, and my
father saying isn’t it about time for breakfast.
In the booth of a roadside coffee shop
our parents would argue about the man,
my mother finally turning her head away
into a fierce silence that would last until Amarillo.
My brother says he remembers none of this.
Whenever I mention this man’s name, Fritz,
to my brother, he becomes angry, saying over
and over that Fritz was someone else, just
another deadbeat, a drifter who happened
to work a while at the plant and then didn’t
show up for work one day. Perhaps he’s right.
Brothers’ arguments rarely get resolved.
At least here I am free to arrive at the place
that is my own memory, a place even a
brother’s arguments will not reach, a place
where one night a man sits on the balcony
of the Twilite Motel and acknowledges complicity
for an explosion that destroys my father’s
hand in the Hürtgen Forest on a freezing night
when the hand itself is too frozen even
to feel the pain of its shredding—this place
where that man bums a light and later asks
my father about work, this place where
my father tells the man the plant might
be hiring soon and he would put in a good
word—this is our place, my father’s and mine,
the only place my father and I have left,
the only place not taken over by the proteins
that went to work in his brain like glue.
We meet in corridors now, or on porches.
The orderlies always say let us know if
you need anything. I tell my father it’s me,
his oldest son. I say my name, and he whispers
back a name he heard first in Arizona, a name
that still roams free of the protein glue.
I nod at the name and take the hand he offers
not the one that was once his good hand,
the one that alone crushed steel beer cans
flat—that hand withered when one side
of him went dead. No. I take the other hand,
the one he once described as raw hamburger.
I take that hand and all its scars into mine.
It’s our first meeting again. In a voice
so weak and raspy that I have to lean
next to his shoulder to hear, my father
tells me that the weather is always wonderful
where he works. He says I’ll like it there.
I’ll get real wages for a full day’s work.
His words come full of saliva now, and I take
the slick string swinging from his mouth
into the palm of one hand. “I think I’ll like
it too,” I tell him. There’s a pause, then he nods.