My father once broke a man's
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his
Two fingers, so it could
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.
I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.
Sometimes,
I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an
In winter, & realize I am looking at the
Again. A thin haze of them,
And persisting.
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die.
Inside him is slowly taking
Every word it ever gave him.
Now, if we try to talk,
I watch my
Search for a lost syllable as if it
Solve everything, & though he can't remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed...
If you think of the mind as a place
Visited, a whole city placed
The eyes, & shining,
I can imagine, now, its end-As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at
All the travelers will be asleep, or
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.
I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a
Believes in carbon, after death.
Tonight,
I'm talking to you, father,
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—Which may be all that's left of you & me.
When I left home at seventeen,
I left for good.
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent
On a black sky. It means
It cannot say. Look, it's empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to
Even a father, even a son.
