Читать книгу The Folded Heart - Michael Collier - Страница 9

The Problem

Awake in the dark, I counted the planes

that hung by thumbtacks and string from the ceiling.

I brought them out of their shadows with their names:

Hellcat, Spitfire, Messerschmitt and Zero.

They were part of a problem that made death fair.

Part promise, part gamble, the problem went like this:

How old must I be before I am old enough for my father to die?

The answer was always twenty-one–

a number impossible to imagine.

It made the world fair enough for sleep.

My father didn’t die when I was twenty-one.

I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know that night after night

I had bargained his life away for sleep.

Now to calm my fear of my father’s death,

I remember the delicate plastic landing gear

of those airplanes, their sharp axles protruding

from the hard gray tires. You had to be careful

with the noxious glue. You had to put one drop

of it on a difficult place and then blow lightly

until the tire began to spin.