When My Brain Left Yesterday

My brain seemed to leave yesterday, sometime during the hockey game, and all that was left was my heart, and it was trying to make up for the empty space inside of me by pushing itself into my throat. It only made things worse.

And this morning, amid all of the uncertainty, the only thing I wanted to know, but couldn't remember, was what was the poem I gave to my Dad for his birthday years ago-because my brain left, and my heart is working double-duty, and it only makes it worse, because hearts don't think.


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden