The Evening Leaves Debris on the Streets of California
…
Father, still in the book, why don’t letters reach your head
like spiders, descending from webs?
Some days I feel like my heart is ripped in an ant’s fist,
food for the flowers.
I don’t know if I will smell like you in forty years,
If the silver of my hair will catch the same light.
…
Questions are a punishment for insomniacs,
red sand shifting in my hands.
Even as a cat, I would head towards water.
…
Time is a home-wound, blue of the shared shampoo
passing between three hands.
Today I think the sky requires more gold
and maybe a horse to run through it.
I want my father’s eyes to wash me,
subject to the home-wound.
…
How long could I still a season, keep a word open, still
a mind? In Shakespeare’s play, mercy is described as rain, a rain
that washes the street and the red alter cups.
…
If I learned to draw him better, he would breathe
more deeply. I like to think of him walking in snow with a red
puffer jacket past his knees. His smile breaks
all the rocks.
…
I eye the briefcase he used for special occasions,
as dusty as his dress shoes.
When he slips into a book the briars grow stern at me.
I am not capable of possessing the grief of a saint.
I don’t know the correct
spot in the composition. The mattress laid out
on the floor and the sun that avoids his face.
My tears are not a law
but something like a branch cracking.
…
Where is the pianist? Within me, a past
of awkward fingers.
A new Chopin waltz has been revealed from the vault.
The notes hear their first daylight in two-hundred years.
My father’s eyes are stones, his thoughts the water running under
that I haven’t heard in years.
My father will never again start a car or slam
a door with vigor, straining the bookshelves.
…
Numbers whisper to me from the grasses. They adore their form.
The moon takes up all the square footage in the apartment.
…
I hammer nails into the wall and hang from them.
…
Where I live now the curtains are thin and white.
I am always running downhill and walking like a sword.
Atlas standing on her tip toes, imagining.
…
I burn myself on a hot pan.
I feel my father’s eyes.
In a way the pain emanates from him.
…
The peach tree’s shadow shifting over the doorway
carries with it a red smell.
The path that could have been possible, my father
running down God’s face, a trace of nectar.
…
Today birds move more like fish than birds.
I straighten the hanging clothes.
A photo of my father, fifteen in a blue mesh shirt.
A crease falls on his right arm and shoulder.
I arrange the lilies to receive a task. Send my father
a single memory each night, if possible.
…
Strange people travel by rain, in their eyes
something like a lion’s scent.
Iris: the muscles under that color,
constant activity controlling
the pupil, aperture of the eye.
…
In a staircase of the real I can either ascend or descend.
How does reality look from the third stair? From my father’s
stare?
Where is the sharply defined line?
…
Night has an infatuation with my mind and pulls it
through the window in bits.
Inherited curse from my father. A night that clutches and drinks.
…
I am not a pen drunk with images.
I never thought it would come to this.
I was a young girl chasing my father from streetlight
to streetlight.
…
I wash my father’s head in white space.
A fig tree grows in the moon.
I make sure he smells of lavender.
…
I will inherit his office map of the world.
What to do with it?
Stroke the boundaries and wear high-heels?
Asters make order on the lawn.
I pin photos to the walls and drink a strange drink.
…
I watch my father do math on the backs of receipts —
addition, subtraction, no division. He gives the numbers
a second life, a second time to wander his mind.
The numbers, little pets, happy for his attention, for the light
leaving his face, the murmur of his voice.
I want the right to his eyes, just for one red-minded moment.
Does my face look similar? Familial?
I am trying my best not to age.
Yuzu on my skin, keeping my hair long.
…
To write a diary thoughtlessly.
To let the mountains descend into coastal waters.
To smash the car to bits.
To bake bread as a wife.
To send light blue notes for the birds to sing.
To paint an endangered animal.
To let love trim the darkness.
…
In silence I cannot keep him as he was.
A spider’s leg is not the same as a blade of grass,
I say to the Cruel God of Wooden Voices.
I break the backyard flowers so they make constant sound.
…
I will sit here endless in the white backyard.
…
The smell of burning: impulse control, emotional regulation, memory.
The anger of thrown shoes. The anger of fatigue. The anger of embarrassment.
The anger of mis-memory. The anger of a daughter, breaking out of necessity.
…
I would insist on one scene.
One day in winter he got on a plane.
I gave him directions neatly written
on a slip of paper. I couldn’t find him for a week.
What happened on the plane?
Too close to a man-made heaven. Too bright. Too anonymous.
What did the eyes of strangers do to him?
The hotel had never heard of him.
…
The photograph deepens on the wall
and I listen to it — like a field mouse at night.
My father said it would never work,
but all night I returned strand by strand
to his head, crowning him back.
The birds, I sent them fetching.
My fifteen year old father wondered
why the birds never left him alone.
They chirped to ease the plucking.
…
My father sleeps tonight
in sheep’s wool. Noon-day
blue gazing restlessly.
I would know him
anywhere. Anywhere I
would know him
sleeping. Everywhere he
is restless in the noon-
day blue. Restless sheep’s
wool. Night’s blue rests
in sheep’s wool. The sheep
damp from the distant
rain, gaining a pound
each. They exist harder.
Repetitions of feeling
stomping into the torn-up
fields, leaning their slim
heads to sip. In the end
the sun will pick its way
through them
re-attributing each mind’s
illness to the heat.
