On the night of my first breath in a delivery room
at Allegheny County General Hospital, my birth father
whom I will never meet is asleep on a bus
disappearing into the mid-west. His name is Frank
Houser. His jacket is crumpled between the side
of his face and the window. It is the 29th
of December, but he dreams rain coming down
so hard, long strands strike the glass as if to shatter it.
My father’s hands are twitching in his lap
and when he looks down a sparrow is nesting
as if in the crook of a tree. Warmth like joy
fills my father’s body because
so delicate a creature has chosen him for safety.
He lightly strokes with the tip of a finger
the small brown head. The bird begins singing
into the darkness of the bus. Its high, sweet trilling
goes out among the sleeping passengers,
drawing each breath into its praise. My father
knows he is as much this song
as anything else in his life. When he looks outside
the rain has subsided into a blazing mist
lit red by the furnaces of steel mills along the river.
Upwards through the mist, against the darkness,
black smoke over the city like the sparrow’s notes,
traveling through my father’s hands into the night
of this place that he is leaving. When he looks down again
his lap is empty. A woman nudges him awake
as the bus pulls into the Cleveland terminal.
Piles of plowed snow are crusted black
beneath the white lights of the empty parking lot.
He stares out the window, trying to remember
what he was dreaming. He is asked if he is getting off here
and he says no, he has much further to go.

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