Down a graveled street of rail track
and road on each hemisphere,
I saw his dark figure.
I was nowhere to begin in the world
but here, seeing my father return
on his bicycle
covered with the smell of a factory.
His black lunchbox rattling like nails
in a can.
His gruff kiss on my cheek
as I pulled at the box
with its sandwich saved for me
and my twin, cooked egg or baloney.
All my life I would reach for food
like this,
and one day in a dream of bread and fruit
saw the rough life of my father
and its taste
across a table of privilege
where the acrid sugar and fermentations
of labor had been removed.
In those years of depression and poverty
my mouth chewed the produce of love,
saw the tincture of coal
in my father’s hair, black and shiny.
And I knew childhood was my chef,
the tattered boards of our house
his arms, music, poetry and wisdom,
the legacy of hard scrapple schooling
that ended in the blood of his murdered father
when he was ten
and was thrown into the servitude
of the factory,
returning each day to us
with a sandwich saved
to feed the innocence of his children.