My Father Speaking About Monsoons
ESH Leighton
My father thinks his voice has gotten tinny with age
that it has thinned and thinned like
some other fathers’ hairlines
I don’t see him much anymore
and when I do, I notice that his body is a different shape,
the hair at his temple gone completely white,
and the skin beneath less freckled and ruddier and ruddier by the year
But his voice,
his voice is stronger than it was when I was a child
When I was so young I could count my years on my fingers,
my favorite book was about the Gingerbread Man
and his hubris and his downfall
I remember my father reading it over and over,
quieter and quieter
as I learned the verse by heart
until I could recite it to myself
until his voice wasn’t there at all
just my own lungs my own larynx my own cadence
Today my father sent me a message of his voice
speaking about the monsoons in Arizona
when here in Las Vegas
we’ve gone two hundred days without rain
He sounded like a great orator
like a man of the stage
like the person you’d want to read you a good book
There were stories in his throat
ones I have never heard
and his voice was cool and concentrated
just like the rain in this desert that never seems to come
