Your father's wet, hamlike thumb-pads still press dough
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made
a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers
wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.
If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.
And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,
think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.
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