Hasp to His Past or Dismiss
Maybe he’s right that it's midnight again. The heart dark
as a tight suit. I have the dim illusion of owning
the last of his words. I look outside past the fragile
air, a pale length of blue sky, the sun hardly bending
or rounding or lowering, but the clouds
of his thought keep diminishing. My father
is not peering out at the native Florida lilies, their white
lips rising in the ocean
of paned glass, naming every direction. His vocabulary shifts
without heft and accords him a woolen substance
of absence. I listen to his words go on their small feet
toward the lilt of the past, sometimes sweetened
by found disappointments. His words are cathedrals:
stone forms. They shape and stay
shaped. I gave up my watch in solidarity
with his confusion and now we talk about the landscape
of mirrors. Everything repeated
as a blur. Even his children
are voices to be looked at, faces of his eye. The world tightens.
I throw open the back door to the family den
with its suburban invitation
to stay as we were. He apologizes
for my womb and I lay my head in the pillows
of papers on my desk. I keep opening
my legs, finding entrances
for my husband’s flesh. I sometimes produce exquisite flowers
but never children. We’ve been so busy
inventing prayer from our pleats. My father asks
the first honest question again
and gets lost. An erratic grief
at the temple, the tempo of the brain building
his dark against sections of floor that used to be
home. He is exactly himself. Summer has started
its cycle early and outside the window, the regular lark
of light. Calm, I elucidate the possibilities
of his history. 1966, 68, what you did
in September. If he dances, I cry. Same watching
him pray. His birthday is in 8 days. The rain has turned
to needles. Most everything happens
in the front of his mouth. The smell
of the sun. Another summer with memory
more careless. It is time to return
to the Dead
Sea and then to the moments I jiggled my body under
the limbo pole and my father followed.
