Lynn Pattison
Michigan poet, Lynn Pattison, is author of Matryoshka Houses (Kelsay Press, 2020) in addition to poetry chapbooks: tesla’s daughter (March St. Press) and Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press). Her full-length collection is Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best Micro-fiction. Pattison’s poems have appeared in Pedestal, Ruminate, New Flash Fiction Review, The Notre Dame Review, Smartish Pace and numerous other publications. Pattison has had a number of works included in anthologies, most recently in: Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage To Trees (Caitlin Press, 2022). She has been supported in her writing by an Irving S. Gilmore Artist Grant, The Ragdale Foundation, and the AWP Writer to Writer Program, and the residency program at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute.
X-ray of my father’s spine
Like the gnarled tree trunk I photographed in the Shakespeare Garden,
knobbled and crooked with age, my father’s backbone—backlit like a saint’s relic
here in the Cathedral of Orthopedic Pronouncements. We’ve come to learn
what can be done to shore up damage, slow disintegration in this settle of bones
that have served for a hundred years. It takes a moment for me see
how the contorted image relates to Dad—the twist and curve, compaction.
I think of a small animal the cat has tortured, rag-tangled on the kitchen floor.
A curving hump pushes my father’s gaze ever closer to the ground.
Lateral turns pinch him into an S, one shoulder above the other. At home
he tried on sport coats, bewildered that none of them closed in front.
How to explain that the curve in back was pulling everything wrong.
I don’t want to look—can’t not—at the image glowing
above the doctor’s right ear. Don’t want to see those fragile underpinnings.
Time has pounded them as surely as a hammer beats iron into submission.
Here is the future written bleak. No illusions. Little to be done
for the recent buckle and break. His organs are cramped, pressed
into a shrinking space. On the way home he will ask if this means
he doesn’t have to fall in order to break anything, it can happen
at any time, I nod. Quiet. The daughter who always had something to say,
silent. Mute as the structure that, for today, supports him.
The brittle scaffolding, fractured and collapsed as it is, holds.
We will hang our last faith on that long habit of these thinning bones.
