Weightless in the shower,

I was gliding on my own

adolescent current of song, my voice

breaking into suds and spray

when the stall door cracked

open to a slice

of my father sliding the knot

in his tie toward his throat

asking was it alright with me

if he remarried.  Can’t hear,

I shouted, soap in my eyes.

His new shoe’s perfect

shine took a giant step

backward into the billowing

steam.  Years later, I told

my four-year-old in the tub

I’m leaving your mother, then

asked if he understood I wasn’t

leaving him.  He left

his wind-up scuba diver sputtering,

stepped into a towel and without a word

closed the mirror-backed door

in my dripping face.  My reflection

distorted in the chrome

doorknob turned counter-clockwise.

My red-eyed boy returned

an angel of vengeance in pajamas,

threw a punch then another

I caught in flight.  We tumbled

to the bath mat.  He cried,

kneed and scratched, his entire

being flailing at mine.  Seven years

of weekends and holidays into the future,

dreaming I’m on my knees at the foot

of the porcelain throne clipping my dead

father’s toenails, the white

crescents growing black

as I go, the sound of bathwater

lapping turns me around to the skinny

frame of my son afloat, raging

at someone he can’t see, calling out

the garbled words of a child in sleep,

the steam rising.