Tallow
by Daniel Schonning
Midnight in mid-April and I sat under the landlord’s cigar tree.
I was such a wreck that night that I had to leave the house, but it was
too dark for Kira to let me go walking—we lived in a corner
of New York where there’s an almost equal chance of being struck by stray
buckshot as by a drunk undergrad in his parents’ Porsche—so I stayed
in the yard. I’d just learned that my father died, but still didn’t know how.
We hadn’t spoken in twenty-two years, not since I was ten. He died
in a doublewide in Wilmington, North Carolina, where it seems
buckshot was far less likely the cause than his whiskey, or an extra
Oxycontin, or a clot in his brain, or too much salt on his eggs.
For his last three months and nineteen days alive, my father didn’t know
that he was a grandfather. I suppose that he either knows now or
never will. I sat beneath the cigar tree—its vermiculate seeds
dangling like the unknuckled fingers of saints, shells candle-soot-black
and piths tallow-white—and I cried, somewhere that wouldn’t wake my daughter.
I had resolved to calm down and go back in when I saw something small
slouching towards me in the grass, its glossy back tossing the sallow light
of the landlord’s sodium lamp. It was an earthworm. And as I looked,
I knew this earthworm looked for me. I knew that he had eaten the flesh
of my father. This earthworm ate all of him—fat, marrow, memory—
then he crawled through the penny-sized hole in his trailer’s screen door, thudded
down its plastic steps to the dusty welcome mat below, he crawled his
meticulous way past the raised beds of mint and rosemary and dill
down the dirt drive, past other trailers with sleeping fathers and their sons,
up Appalachian hollows and through their poisoned hamlets, crawled shoulders
of rural roads caked with horse shit and dead things, crawled bare pastures and lush
meadows, at times almost swimming the flooded green swales and frontage roads,
crawled past the black glass eyes of robins and thrushes and redwing blackbirds,
among runoff and refuse and all the lowest things. My father crawled
like his own father crawled to survive the war, like St. Odilo crawled
to the altar, my father crawled like his granddaughter will one day crawl,
until his pink-gray belly flushed brown and the wet earth bled from him, crawled
for three months and nineteen days, for twenty-two years, toward the sound of wind
shuddering tree seeds, toward the hiss of the sodium lamp and its sweet
sidereal light—my father crawled all the way from North Carolina
just to hold my hand.
Daniel Schonning is the author of As When Waking (University of Chicago Press, 2025), awarded the Four Quartets Prize by the Poetry Society of America. His poetry has been featured in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and serves as a poetry editor for Seneca Review.