I Watch My Father Shaving
My father shaves on Wednesday, the half-shut day,
with meticulous care, oiling the whetstone,
clipping the leather strop to the towel-rail,
opening the cut-throat razor, lathering the soap.
After the rush of water comes the scuff
of badger-brush on bristled skin. Then,
the blade I have been warned against.
Tool for suicide, murder, piracy, instrument of intimacy.
But I am young, permitted yet to linger
like a woman outside the Holy of Holies
unacknowledged as he moves through this spare prelude
toward the crescendo of his good, his going-into-town suit.
I loiter at the doorway until he turns, grins, sends me off
with three big pennies to squander in Fordyce’s sweetshop,
the only shop that doesn’t close this afternoon
when the town folds up like my father’s razor.
Smooth, he is no longer the crumpled man I clamber on,
whose craggy face I paint with Mum’s old lipsticks,
who submits as I fuss with his thinning hair and scratchy mustache.
This afternoon is all his purpose; by this quiet ritual he reclaims himself.
Linda Arntzenius’s poems have been published in Exit 13, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Kelsey Review, Paterson Literary Review, Princeton Magazine, Schuykill Valley Journal, Slant, Up & Under, US1 Worksheets, among other journals.