Dreaming Of Johnny Cash
Ronald- father-
wherever thou art
why are you still appearing in my dreams?
you’ve been dead now for twelve years!
I remember that last time I saw you-
at Kentville Hospital
hot-wired to an oxygen bag
you gasping, grasping
for each hard-earned breath
you wanted it all to end
but they kept re-reviving you
inserting a catheter into your oesophagus -
you reliving your imminent death countless times
your lungs choked from years of smoking
& foundry work
& that night they snatched you
from that Amtrak train in Springfield
your lungs brimming with Canadian Club chunder.
*
We had a reunion of sorts
back in Aylesford in the family home
a few weeks before you died-
you hooked up to an oxygen machine
near the back porch
us thirty-something kids upstairs
playing, not so cynically this time,
your Johnny Horton and Johnny Cash records-
toking away & madly cackling.
Later in the night
I went down for a piss
& asked if you were OK
you gesturing in a hyperbolic manner
to turn the outside lights off.
*
I’m sorry dad
I switched off the double adaptor
attached to your oxygen machine
it was an accident- honest-
I can still imagine you sputtering
getting up in the dead of night
cursing,
flicking
the machine back on.
I remember that last day in Canada
at Kentville Hospital
I kissed you reluctantly as I left
to catch my flight,
the hard stubble of your beard
still brushing in my mind.
as I write now.
In the lift down
a nurse noticed me gagging,
stifling the torment
& spoilingly attempted to comfort me,
diverting me from that harrowing
but redemptive glimpse
into the finality of all things.
*
Ronald-father
the other night
I dreamt you were living with me in Oz
you sat at the table
closely reading the stock market pages
with your conical magnifying glass
& drinking a bottle of Coopers Sparkling Ale-
I’d just returned from the beach
I asked whether you had heard Johnny Cash’s
Folsom Prison Blues was out on Blue Ray CD.
You told me bluntly, ‘I saw it lying on the coffee table
but I couldn’t get the goddamn machine to work.’
As I struggled to buckle up my pants
around my upper chest
I remembered with a wry smile
that you were dead.
Note
'Dreaming of Jonny Cash' is a tribute to my Old Man. It is one of the first poems I ever wrote and it appeared in the e-zine Megaera #21, March 2005. The title is borrowed from Grant Caldwell's excellent poetry collection Dreaming of Robert De Niro (Five Island Press, 2003) which I was reading at the time.
Bold Monkey Review will publish more of my uncollected and unpublished poems in the coming weeks and months.
