The Curse
In the smoke of his words comes a sign
that we can’t sleep anymore
under the calm dome of the moon
when auburn wildfires race to breed
both needle and cone, and black water
floods flatten horizons to mock hereafter,
like pine martens plundering a nest
of snowcocks, the hungry red anguish
of boyhood hunger—
“Father, your children!”
My eyes fall at radiant openings
among limbs of hemlock and cedar,
Canadian or Himalayan, suffering
in landscapes of handsome stone faces,
like the chateau in a leafy French valley,
or the Lake of the Little Fishes,
where the First Nations gathered roots
south of the Arctic Circle, all totems
watching and waiting in wood or marble
for a wondrous new birth to martyr,
as if my sight into forest and sculpture
might find a way back to a syntax
of reverence for home, for his house,
a wistful miracle of badlands
to scrub my hair and skin,
a self-portrait
where the artist defies the margins
by symbol, by prophecy,
with a thick pith of betrayal
and my apology for his absence,
the golden embrace of another dread
far from the one I thought I’d inherited,
the feast of forgiving oneself
the torment of a boy’s bloody mouth
of open wings trying to fly higher,
high enough to span one more wink
from him, of my father in the canopies,
escaping the pedestal I made him
without knowing the desolation
of the drowned, or the ironic reward
of burning in the sky so far below.
Summer Is Another Cliché
The fan blades spin down
sunken, my bed without
his bald crown
because he lies
in another room, black eye
down a crescent hall
of dead prey, their neck
and shoulder mounts
on shields of spalted maple,
his face a shearing force
with cheek, an amuse-bouche,
he startles easily, what he sees
beneath the light,
trains rumble by hobo fires
crackling like teeth,
a doll armature,
his tracks are my coastline
of submergence,
all the sheets balling up
behind closed doors,
in outpatient lamplight,
I pause to consider the heft
of his chest, red velvet skull
plate in September,
of what’s denied by sleep,
by taking a door off
in pieces,
the unexpected kiss
from under his chest,
the undertow
of a new planetary body.
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