The Wild
When I come from the wilderness,
I come alone. I could not learn this
from the pastorals of prayer. The god
who dies when a childhood dies fells
a father’s body. Only then is death
a hammer. Its one eye looks down on us.
The god who once survived his death is
not as visible now. Or breakable,
personal, though his suffering bears
the burden. It gets confusing to a kid,
the one god who lives in our fathers.
I want to say they come to life in spaces
where we talk. You and I, face to face,
in the untouched light that has no face.
*
I fed my pain to the irony machine,
and jewels of flies flew out the other side.
It was easy as breathing. It was a dream
without an ocean. A darkening below.
I too have a phony double, or two,
and the irony machine is our robot friend.
It thumps the heart like a dusty carpet.
If a metaphor is a bearing over, where,
I ask. You who are listening, where.
I have heard you come and go like time’s
device I take for granted until it breaks.
Know this. I want for you a better life.
Most cardinal when broken. Like ribs
that ache pure light in the gathering swells.
*
As a boy, I dreamt I had another father.
He was somewhere on a beach in the sun
of Southern California. Look at me,
I said, the way dreams and scriptures do.
I had a happy life. Or so I imagined.
But my father was sad, or sadness was
how I understood his silence. All day
he read a book whose pages never turned.
Or they turned the way waves do, never
closer to the end. We were bound by that.
Look at me, I said, with my tiny shovel
and bright red pail. Every tower I built
I built for you. Every home the surge
of daylight dragged clawing at the shore.