Waltz

photo by Aleksander Stokic

The spring after my father
moved out, my mother
slides an LP

onto the stack spindle
of the Zenith console stereo 
and swings the balance arm

across to hold the album
in place. I stand backed
          into a corner, hands

in my pockets, freshly orphaned
by my parents’ divorce. She twists
the knob from Off to Play

to Change.  My father is somewhere
and nowhere. The platter
            spins and squeaks, the album

 
drops. My father is here
and not here. The needle
lowers to that initial hiss

that vinyl makes, then
a waltz in monaural
static. Next spring

my father will disappear for fifteen
years. But now my mother
            has turned and taken my hands

from my pockets and leads me, unwilling,
into leading. We circle, we circle
each other, we circle

the room that is too small,
stuffed as it is with the furniture
for a family: the easy chair

where my father read
the paper, the coffee table
with its water ring, the plaid

sofa and, above it, an ornately
framed print of an idyllic
waterfall that never falls 
                      
into a pool that never ripples
            where a fisherman casts
a line that is always suspended

just above the water.
We circle, my mother and I,
and I know—I just know—

that somewhere there is
a center, a fixed point
against which all

change is measured. We circle
                       the room. We circle. Our dance
inscribes an emptiness. Without 
  
my knowing it, I prepare myself
                      for sorrow. The waltz drags on
             forever, it seems, in the phut-
                        
phut of the needle knocking
                        against the vinyl’s small
             central, locked room.