bell hooks says my father should have been a closed fist —
that the patriarchy required him
to amputate the soft parts before passing
the disease along.
I keep looking for that man.
I cannot find him in mine.
My father broke down at the doctor’s office
Talking about his diagnosis…
the morning his own father died,
He cried
and did not apologize for it,
did not turn it into a lesson
about what a son owes a son.
He just wept into his coffee
and let me see.
I am told I am theoretical evidence
of a system that hardened me —
that whatever softness I claim
is merely the velvet glove
over the same inherited knuckle.
I read the chapter twice.
I underlined the parts I agreed with.
I still could not locate myself
in the diagnosis.
Maybe the syndrome is real
and I am the outlier — the asterisk,
the footnote that proves
the rule by failing it.
Or maybe the rule was always
thinner than its prophets,
and there were always men
who loved their wives
without rehearsing dominion,
who held their boys
without excusing the contact
who said the tender thing
because the tender thing
was simply true.
My wife knows what I look like
when I am afraid.
She has seen me
ask for help.
She has seen me
ruined by a piece of music
I cannot explain.
None of this was a defection.
None of this required
a revolution against my own bones.
I will not pretend the wound
is not out there, vast,
and dressed in my clothes.
I have watched men
mistake their fear for fury
and call it inheritance.
I have watched the cost.
But I will not give the patriarchy
my father’s grief.
I will not give it
the times that taught me
a man can carry a friend
through the worst year of their life
without ever once making it
about himself.
I will not surrender the evidence
of my own loving
to a theory that needs me
to be sicker than I am.
The book closes.
The sky is the color
of late spring…
Somewhere, as they share lunch
A man is making his daughter
laugh so hard
she has to put down her knife —
and that, too,
is what we are.
according to s.e. senter 
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