Ode to My Father Photographing the Moon Each Night
15%
September 16, 2017
It must be a rite for him, like prayer
nightly. I look at his reproduction of a moon
I never saw: a gravity pulls me along.
2%
September 21, 2017
Your smile is lopsided now, changing places
from one side to the other. For those
who saw you before ambition took over,
what must it have meant to see you
so diminished, a glint the only proof of you.
Your picture evidence my father exists.
13%
September 23, 2017
My father doesn’t believe in unlucky numbers,
insists on taking your photo each night, your light
streaking towards the deck, you an orange rind
in the bottom of a knapsack waiting to be thrown
out. Waiting, always, for what else can happen:
reflection of the sun. Maybe nothing
is waiting on your other side, maybe we have
thought too much of you, maybe you hide only
what we devise—your personhood still debated,
your body’s composition in question.
20%
September 24, 2017
You look like the classic vision of a crescent moon.
Like a glazed croissant. A child’s vision
of imperfection, or an adult’s of perfection.
You look beautiful,
lonely, too, of course you do; you look at me,
I’m sure, and have the same thoughts, too.
28%
September 25, 2017
Your defects are more visible to the naked eye now.
I see your face pockmarked like my own and feel
a kinship to you, like we are not-bodies hovering
in different spaces. We may as well be sitting next
to each other on a sofa, commenting on how long
our hair has gotten, complimenting your new glasses.
We can see each other, and that means something.
65%
September 29, 2017
You look round, expectant, like you are
waiting for yourself to be born. Your colors
clear adjectives. I want to hold what I know
of you in my hand and let it go, to fall into darkness
like you are falling away from it, let my body
reconcile itself to nothingness, let the earth
and its gravity do what they can.
99%
October 4, 2017
My eyes are insufficient to the task of seeing
you as you really are: beautiful, wholly
separate from the darkness that surrounds and
threatens to envelop you, a beacon
for half the world. The other half sees you
as a ghost in the morning sky. If I could
touch you, I know, my hand would pass right through.
100%
October 5, 2017
Is this what I have been waiting for? Expectation
and release. A shadow still hangs on your rightmost
edge, teasing me into disbelief that this is who you
are. And yet, there is a holiness to your visage:
you do not smile at me and I do not smile at you,
but we are both known, somehow. Both of us
see one another. I imagine that many look up to you
and believe that someone they love is performing
the same act. It provides comfort. It orders a world
that seems so irrational, like the numbers on a clock,
a calendar. Counting up and then returning to 1.
Ode to My Father Watching Pokémon 2000
with me. In a packed theater in Antioch.
The year: irrelevant. When Pikachu died
everyone in the theater laughed
while I cried, but my father did not. He held
my hand and said, It’s okay, son. It’s going
to be okay. He was right. The memory
is fuzzy and clear at the same time, the way
memory so often is, a piece of fogged glass
I keep trying to peer through anyway.
Too young to understand the rules of good
or bad stories, I was so certain something
terrible had happened and was
irreversible. There’s so much to say
about this particular story, if one cared to.
A room full of people who knew
that Pikachu would be resurrected like
my father knows he will live again like
I am certain that our loves matter
more than our lives—the things we pour
ourselves into have to account for something,
don’t they? All these years of attention
and effort. I am not crying while I write these
words but I could. Father, next time I hold you
I will try to mean it more than before.
Todd Osborne
Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally from Nashville, TN. His debut poetry collection, Gatherer, was published by Belle Point Press in 2024. His poems have previously appeared at EcoTheo Review, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives and writes with his wife, their son, and their three cats in Hattiesburg, MS.