Climbing Lessons

Collin Brennan

Once,
it must have been when I was small
and every understanding sort of bled
into the next, I climbed my father’s spinal column
just to see what was at the top. He
was surprised, mom later told me, not knowing that
a quieter part of me tastes heights
as some exotic dish. I’ve been to the tip-top
of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, and there
was no ceiling to touch and I remember
being there, and even then how
my heart was faultless and still and
letting my face and hands regain their form

I fall backwards in this room
and all of this is reaching, reaching
into the next but

there is no ceiling to touch. It’s like looking
into a photograph of a mirror and trying
to tell who is holding the camera.

Flash.

Now he is running faster
than I’ve seen him run in years
around the bases and likely aggravating
some unspoken truth. I wince from the top row
of bleachers. My father spent nineteen years
judging my reactions, storing pride
like pocket-coins for each time I jumped
off a highway overpass, knowing that
I had digested it: everywhere you can go, Collin,
is relative to this-and-that, up-and-down.
He cannot believe that
I can stomach so much.

Now he comes laughing to slap my back
and I slap his back and hold on and laugh, too,
and grab on to those knotted obtrusions
as if I am small again,
and begin to climb.