Now, in my retirement years, I have a study in the back of the house.
It’s just a bedroom with a stack of books on the floor and an old rolltop
that I found at a garage sale. I loaded the desk in the truck by myself,

dismantled it at home, and carried each section up the stairs to the bedroom
the dog uses when hiding from thunder. Over time I’ve hung
an antique photograph of my grandmother and a portrait of my father

painted by my daughter. Dad watches me at my desk from the wall.
I study his face like the rough draft of a poem. He pushes me to finish
the work I’ve started. He had little regard for quitters. I imagine yesterday

he would have voted Republican, having found Trump as an Archie Bunker,
a nickel Pepsi bottle, a nine-dollar wristwatch, a Ginsu knife.
We seldom discussed politics. He would have shrugged me off

to watch the birdfeeder, laughing at how the squirrel slipped on the pole
he’d sprayed with WD40. He taught me how to buck up when I lost.
I keep a baseball in a cubby hole of the rolltop. My father used it

when he threw out the first pitch at the university ballfield. I practice
the old grip he taught for the curve. When it worked, it was as good
as a poem. When it didn’t, well, it hung in the strike zone like a melon.

Al Ortolani is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. His most recent collection of poetry, Controlled Burn, was just released by Spartan Press. Currently, he lives in the Kansas City area with his wife and their Facebook celebrity dog, Stanley.