Another Poem About My Father

Another Poem About My Father

I don’t get poetry either. Mostly I get cavities,
ad mail. Once, I got eleven hundred dollars
in small change from my father for Christmas.
He said, you’ve got to work for your money-
meaning you’ve got to haul it through six feet 
of snow to the bank, good luck, here’s a bag.
My father is more like a poem than most poems
are. He once tucked a living loon into his coat
and brought it home to amuse my mother who
loves birds, especially surprised-sounding birds,
especially owls. My nostalgia receptors zigzag
wildly through me when I think of my father
pushing his metal detector across all the parks,
school yards, and riverbanks of this great nation,
waving it back and forth – like some sort of
yaywho, my mother would say – until it beeps
solemnly above a nickel. With a butterknife
he cuts such slender metaphors from the earth.

~ Kayla Czaga