Cleaning Out the Shed

My father has gone. He has taken his brown skin and flashing eyes, his laughs and shouts and silences. He has taken his beer man smell, his fishy stink, his whiskers in the basin. Dunc has gone too. He has gone to school in the city and we won't see him until he comes home for the holidays. Now I sleep in my mother's bed. My father's smell is in the mattress, in the curtains and the walls; it is in my head...