Daddy's Girl

my father was a gardener
from dairy farm days
with July winters
and 4 am day breaks.
he left
eventually (too charming for a barn)
to find the Pacific Northwest,
U.S. Navy,
and Steve McQueen's Hollywood.

my upstate New York
girlhood summers were
spent skipping tombstones,
(Jacob Mueller 1885)
chasing my daddy's grampa's farmhouse ghost,
hooking worms for a catfish lake,
and catching a baby skunk
we'd smuggle across state lines
in a dog carrier.
we brushed nanny goats like ponies,
fed baby pigs with blue bottles,
(like my 'baby alive' doll)
watched our lap dog chase two rabbits round the yard.
we napped on a porch together -
my love-strangle hold
on a white cat
like an angel.

when a snake showed up in my father's garden one summer
the neighbors came to investigate.
the infestation! the rats!
they would take over backyards,
eat tomatoes, and bite children
to the beat of St.Vitus' dance.
so my daddy drove it to a pasture
in our Ford station wagon-
freedom in a wooden crate
and bicentennial blanket.
.

last night
i dreamt i took a nap in an old farm's pasture-
a moonlit bed of snakes.
they rolled round my ankles,
ran over my elbows and wrists like bracelets,
through my dark tangled hair like dancing ringlets.
snakes like otters -
bounding through reeds
in under lily pads-
slinkies we rolled down stairways,
kittens tumbling in haystacks.

i stood in the grass
watched them pulse beside me.
a silent beat on some snake frequency
lullaby rattle and roll,
like the hands of a river tumble rocks to a bed,
to a child's pocket,
to her father's dresser,
and into your shoe.

dance with me.
my father was a charmer
and i am not afraid.

B.VanSchaick