On the day my son turns sixteen, I discover
the language with no word for father.
He takes his presents to his room, closes the door,
loads a new video game. I imagine the Amazon basin,
the fatherless Piraha people unafraid of the anaconda
slipping silently through the current, fatherless by choice—
not even erasure, just absence, something that haunts me
like the arapaima just below the surface, dark and sleepless.
I slept with a light on for years in the fatherless murk
of my dreams. A man just out of focus shouting words
from the stands of a baseball game, as if language could
connect what he had unplugged, as if nouns are presence.
Piraha call baíxi in the night, to the “parent” who soothes them
back to sleep, a woman resting her brown muscled hand
on the child’s back, something solid, something felt in the space
between shoulder blades. I could say to my son, tap his door
with a finger and call out my name, father as “dad,” trying to coax
from those three letters a history of a tribe I’ve never known.
But what do I do with a language that calls me father, my son
who pretends not to hear as I stand outside his door.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.
P. Ivan Young received his PhD from the University of Nebraska Lincoln and currently is the communications coordinator for Nebraska Children and Families Foundation. He is the author Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain (Brickhouse Books, 2015). His most recent publications have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Mantis, Rhino, and American Life in Poetry.
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