Winter Stars

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.