aubade
love
a hummingbird
stain of sky
you're rubbing with rags
dome of moon
cut neat in half
bass of his laugh
rain cleansing a river
river giving itself
back to sky
smell of dandelion
wine he ages
love travels
on shoulders of light
love is light's
unspoken ache
coyotes do not have a word for love
coyotes howl
all night lovers ask do you love me
all night the manifold beloveds howl
years ago a teacher asked us to sew a flag
for a country called Love my father carried me
to the terrace & pointed upwards
let's scissor a piece of sky
so your flag is full of stars
sleep fragments
since he refuses to speak
I observe him sleep
the whole experience is akin
to crossing an ocean
walking on a bridge of stones
except it's not stones it's electricity
and the ocean's not an ocean
but your father's soul
*
a ten-inch mattress
rests on the floor
(the bed too far
off the ground for me)
beside ma's diwan
uneasy as time he moves
from one side to another
ever changing
his position like Jupiter
one could be so restless
only in a body
they want to escape
*
my voice is your voice
my empty chair your empty chair
my budding bald spot your bald head
my wakeful sleep your wakeful sleep
*
what if all these poems about you
are like a movie which loses everything
good about the book
*
the Jupiter of his body collides
with the diwan
*
one afternoon I inform him he hums in his sleep
there is no one who does not
some babble others sing gospels
*
perhaps if we said please
please rain please Tuesday
please sleep
*
no alcoholic steps into the same sleep twice
*
is a poem beginning
there was a time my father
or a poem fashioned from his insomnia
a portrait of the father or the poet
or both or neither
*
so glad your snores are solely yours
*
night an orchestra of insects
sleep an abandoned hall
*
you've got to be a ceiling fan to understand any of this
*
all dreams memory after waking
all words law after believing
*
the body bleeds out the night's undoing
here we are again awake he says to himself alive
Heritage
I inherited my father’s nose (who inherited his father’s righteousness and his mother’s color blindness) and my mother’s hostility (who inherited her mother’s hospitality and her father’s nervous smile). My father’s father inherited his father’s aura migraines (who inherited his father’s high cholesterol and his mother’s manner of eating without chewing) and his mother’s hair (who inherited her mother’s falsetto and her father’s temper). My father’s mother inherited her mother’s elation (who inherited her father’s empathy and her mother’s diabetes) and her father’s sweat glands (who inherited his father’s alcoholism and mother’s silence). My mother’s mother inherited her father’s introversion (who inherited his father’s laugh lines and his mother’s poor memory) and her mother’s brittle fingernails (who inherited her mother’s moustache and her father’s metabolism). My mother’s father inherited his father’s insomnia (who inherited his father’s potbelly and his mother’s eye dust) and his mother’s baldness (who inherited her mother’s freckles and her father’s sweet tooth).
