3 of 3 Poems I have heard Len read beautifully | A. Hirsh

Things I’m Good At

Delphine, who lived next door to me junior year, asked for help: the Jeep she borrowed (to get to the kids she tutored) kept stalling out. It was an ’86 or ’87, black, with doors you could pull off and lean

against the wall in the garage, and a canvas top that snapped on over a roll bar.

I stepped up and in, put it in reverse, and let the clutch out slowly. The engine shuddered and failed. Delphine, whose bed rested atop an identical bed, and so on all the way down,

stood in the street with her books pressed to her chest until I saw the T of the parking brake handle under the instrument panel,

pulled it, eased the clutch, backed out of the driveway, and stepped down so that Delphine could step up and in.

There wasn’t much my father was good at. I never saw him get under the car or the sink or come back from the garden with his hands full of tomatoes and lavender. If I asked him about a biography he was reading, he would stammer. He paid someone to cut the grass and he couldn’t speak French or quit smoking or drinking or throw a baseball for shit.

But I was in the room when the trim oncologist told him you will die soon and over the next six months he settled in, presented with something he could do—

like a traveler who has made his connections and transfers, found his host and gotten the keys, then drops his bags and heads back out to look around.

My father laid his belongings out on the bed and apportioned them until all that was left were his ties and his shoes.

He got the piano tuned and practiced Debussy and Liszt; he dug out his fishing tackle and his fly-tying gear and the basement whirled with Royal Coachmen but my father kept focused on the splay of deerhair in the vise,

brushing the flies away from his face,

never catching a barb in the pads of his fingers.

When I asked him how he felt, he said, “It’s not all

right, but it’s okay.”

The hammer Abby lent me is still in a drawer, and in April I paid someone else to do my taxes; the buttons get loose and fall off my jacket in the winter.

But there is something else I now know I can do— it’s the only thing we know we can do, that’s impossible to fail at— and I know how to do it well.

All night we watched him as his breath eased

he moved forward under his own power I wonder if he knew we were around him.

—Len Nalencz