It was our rock art, semitone lullaby,

slapback echo of V-8s against the hills,

a supercharged tinnitus, four-barrel whomp, cars —

revved-up cars for men with no release.

Witness This

Witness This

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their wrappers, perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade victory lap — the Great Wall, the Blue Lagoon, the Panama Canal, the unsmiling projection of him and his second wife against the world’s great achievements, as if his dodging the sinkhole were an epic that needed witnesses besides his own camera.

Each narrated photo lingered, without joy but studied observation, dust swirling in the projector’s haze, as my father sat, middle-aged, his own family seated in halo, swallowing his rage and his grief. It should have been his mother there, dressed in linen, leaning against the cool crutch of a terrace railing, the half-drunk glass of rosé ghosting a day’s pleasure spent peering into Capri’s too-green-to-believe water.

She was the worker, though, the one who plated dinners at five, and wiped his tears and kept him company and mixed the drinks, and told him secrets, and huddled him against her sisters’ menthol’d embraces in their tiny apartments above the capitol, where they lived alone, except for when certain men came to visit and they put on furs and stepped in and out of Buicks with the practiced steps of women who knew how easily gladness combusts.

His mother’s heart burst while he was away, and so there was a life, forsworn of travel, a decadence and abandonment of what mattered. So we carved our way down interstates, crammed into a car with holes in the undercarriage, inscribing our childhoods onto the Central Valley, its mean brown flats, the irrigation canals, hidden estuaries, the fields his father once worked a long time ago, before he grabbed a rung and held on with the clench of a man who knew how to survive.

My grandfather traveled into his middle nineties — leaf-season in New Hampshire, the Alaskan coast in April, the Rocky Mountain express across Canada — but he never visited his dying daughter-in-law, the one who also dreamed of Paris, and ordered cakes from England, and who read of Russian revolutions, but who saw none of it, even when he knew she was dying, and then it was too late: the sons arrowing back, the taking of turns sleeping on the sofas, the theater of morphine, the curtains’ plea for privacy.