I was still standing although
 Gabriella Wells and Barbara Ryan were too,
 their bodies dark against the wall of light
 that dull-pewter December afternoon,
 shadows with words that flowed
 so easily from their mouths,
 fluorescent and grievous,
 pied and effervescent,
 words I'd spelled out to the rhythm
 of my father's hoarse whispers
 during our nightly practice sessions
 beneath the dim bulb,
 superfluous, excelsior,
 desultory and exaggeration
 mixed with his Schaefer breath
 and Lucky Strike smoke

 as I went down
 The List of Most Difficult Words
 with a man whose wife had left,
 one son grown into madness,
 the other into death,
 my father's hundred and five-pound skeleton
 of skin glowing in that beer-flooded kitchen
 when he'd lift the harmonica

 to blow a few long, sad riffs
 of country into a song
 while he waited for me to hit
 the single l of spiraling,
 the silent i of receipt,
 the two of us working words hard
 those nights on Olmstead Street,
 sure they would someday save me.