AFTER YEARS THINKING ABOUT DYING
I search for my father in Paris. I look
for him in people drizzled by the rain.
In the apartment on Quai d’Anjou, David,
who is like a father, sits with his coffee
at the dining table. He sits in my mind,
and I hear him, like a memory, asking us
to go, and smoke, a cigar on the Seine.
I search for Hemingway and for Pound.
Search for Steine and Ford and Picasso,
rain falling on Rue de l'Odéon. I search
for Howard, who is also like a father,
in cathedrals. I search for him, like I do
for God—that is, constantly. A priest,
another Father, sings over communion.
God like a ghost, like an apparition—
my Heavenly Father’s hands rest soft
on my head, voice echoing in my ear.
Love washes over me and fills me up.
My fathers, in Paris, all sing of miracles.
And what a miracle, O God, I am here.
What a miracle, my resurrection. Moss
growing abundant on the stone walls
of the Seine. And me, a grateful witness.
EXITING LINES
When I’m old or not old, when death comes, when death meets me
in person, me possibly shitting my pants, maybe I’ll remember taking
a shit in Rochefort-en-Terre, in the public restroom across from Notre-
Dame de la Tronchaye. Maybe I’ll remember the coldest porcelain seat
of my life, remember it like my sexual awakening. On the train to Rennes,
the French countryside reminds me of the Ozarks. Different, yes—cute
towns instead of trash dumps for yards and Dixie flags on their houses,
their cars, their t-shirts. Sometimes I wonder why France looks like France
and Missouri looks like Missouri. I wonder if Missouri will exist when I’m old,
if America will exist when I’m old, if I will ever grow old—like leaves turning
in November. Death coming for all their little lives, falling (breaking free?)
from the tree which continues on to spring, new buds and new leaves,
and France—once again, as always, is beautiful. I wonder if I’ll age enough
so there comes a spring I won’t live to finish, when death finally arrives
for a small coffee and a smoke, maybe a cafe in Reims, a warm day where
hopefully, I’m not shitting my diaper, and instead, me—thinking about how
far I’ve come, how many lives I’ve lived, how many times I’ve watched
Grace Kelly in The Rear Window, her voice in my dreams since I was eleven,
awakening me for a good long conversation, and Death, who has always
been so beautiful, sits and smiles and says—I love funny exiting lines.
QUIET
I must be one of the quietest animals on earth.
Maybe a sloth or a giraffe, maybe a rabbit.
When I look out my hotel window at Vientiane,
I think about my life as a child. My memories so very quiet,
like Kansas countryside, fields of milo and soybean and wheat.
My father never speaks in them. And I never speak in them.
When I moved out at eighteen, my father, frightened, said
the world was hard and I’d probably need to come home.
My father spoke in challenges—so I moved farther and farther away—
both in the distance between us and what I believed.
I find the world so very different from what he claimed—
nāga and buddhas, tuk-tuks and diesel—
Christ, nowhere to be seen or found.
The stray dogs wandering the street,
somehow survive and ask
when I can’t ask for anything—not my wife, for her body
or my father, for him to call. When I saw butterflies
in the Buddha Garden alight from bougainvillea
to bougainvillea, whispering small secrets to the flowers,
I whispered too, quiet like a song or chant—
Om Mani Padme Hum. And in my next life, I pray to have a father
who loves me. I ask for the wherewithal to speak up.
To be a lion or Coqui frog—a cicada, a howler monkey, maybe a wolf.
No more whispers or small prayers or opinions you can’t hear.
Me, howling to the moon all my secrets.
My father howling back. My father howling back. My father howling back
to the whole world how much he loves me.
DRUTHERS, CA
Sometimes, I want to live until I’m old and my skin is like paper.
A breath later, I complain how I can’t hold every good thing
together at once. In college, I had a girlfriend whose breasts
spilled over the space of my hand and it was never upsetting.
I whine and moan when I’m home in Santa Barbara and see
pictures of Reims on Instagram. I talk shit while drinking
champagne in France and my friends are walking beaches
at sunset—beaches I never walk when I’m home, but then,
all at once, it’s the only thing I want. This happens all the time.
I want to sleep late and have a full day. Want to write code—
for money—but still have a mind and heart for poetry later.
I want my friends and their children with me in Paris, in Italy,
wherever I need to live to be happy—which is everywhere.
My father still likes to tell me: things can get worse. He also
likes to say: God is still on the throne. I wonder, quite often,
if things get worse because God makes them worse. Is there
some dimension where things can only get better? Maybe
a universe where we can drink all the champagne we want
but never get too drunk? A timeline where everyone we love
is in our life, together, and Paris is nestled between the ocean
and the Santa Ynez mountains, but somehow still affordable—
and we’re not constantly thinking about some additional thing,
or some other person we need to be happy and the world is
never on fire from war and I get to watch the children of my
friends grow up. A world where even I want to have children.
I could watch them play soccer in the neighborhood plazas.
Have as many beers as I’d like. Smoke all the cigarettes I want
without dying even a little. Do you see? Whatever god built
this world did a shit job. These ciggies are fucking killing me.
I’m drunk in Paris, not very happy, and I don’t want to get so
old my skin is like paper. Where you almost see through it,
see beneath it, in danger of it tearing all the time. I just want
to be old enough to die first. Listen, my love. Let me admit
this one thing. I can’t seem to live in this world on my own.
SONS OF GOD
I live, like most sons do,
for my father’s approval—
unseen. I live in grass,
green beneath the boot.
✭
My father asks to meet him in the desert.
And I find him, in human cosplay—dying
from hunger. I tell him—make some food.
Do the whole “bread from the rocks” trick.
He refuses, says—Carry me. Show me the
world before I die. I ask if he can fix the
world—the hunger, violence, and greed?
He laughs, like I’m a child, and tells me
I must take him to Jerusalem. I lay him
down on the temple steps. I ask for help
and look for his friends. When I return,
he is gone. Later, I find him again, calling
me a devil to all his companions. One of
them writing—while snickering to himself.
✭
In a beginning, the spirit of God moved over the waters,
moved over the formless deep.
And then, a different beginning, the Missouri Ozarks
and me born into them. My father,
who told stories of how he walked an animal trapline
for squirrels and rabbits.
What’s a trapline? I asked. In a beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God.
My father's word to me, constantly, said I was lucky
to have a roof over my head.
A trapline is a series of traps set to capture animals
moving through the woods.
I consider my own spirit, once moving free through
the universe, taken prisoner.
✭
For my father’s approval
I live, like most sons do—
unseen. Still green, in
grass beneath the brute.
✭
The way my father told it, some railroad tie gangs had machines,
but not his. His was backbreaking work, pulling and driving spikes.
He told me he missed once, the hammer bouncing off the rail back
into his face. New years of January ’79, my father was called to
Kansas City to sweep switches. He met the train at the railroad
yards in Springfield, sleeping all night in the caboose, no heat.
Sweeping switches means you remove debris and snow and frost
from the handle, ensuring the switch can move in both directions—
engaging the locking mechanism. He used a broom, with an end
that chiseled ice, for eight hours in the frigid cold. My father tells
me that I have it easy, considering all the nights he spent like that.
And I try to imagine him asleep on a Greyhound bus, riding back
home the night of my birth. Imagine him just twenty-one and soon
to be a father of a son who would never, not really, appreciate him.
✭
Little traumas passed on to me,
multiplied by a good measure,
pressed down and shaken together,
running over and free.
I wasn’t allowed to disagree.
He lived above the refrigerator,
an ever present neighbor—
this paddle, this Mr. Woody.
My father liked to threaten me
with the name he carved by router.
Was I a child or a coward
when I couldn’t find words to speak?
With each beating came a hug,
abuse dressed up to look like love.
✭
Unseen—I live in grass,
for my father’s approval.
I live, like most sons do—
neck beneath the boot.
✭
O Light Bringer, did Father God get it wrong
when He cast you down to earth? Morning Dawn,
when He said your sin was Pride, named you Satan,
when He gave angels with you slurs for names,
when He stripped them of light to give them darkness,
when Father called them demon; Lucifer, confess—
are the old stories true? You wanted Him to pay
for it? Refused to bow the knee? Chose to take
the time towards perfecting our demise?
Did you invent money? Incite wars? Invite
the billionaire? Demon of Whatever-
Thing-We-Hate-About-Someone-Else was clever.
Tell me, what is the greatest trick you pulled?
I wonder if it's the trick I was told.
✭
My father used to smile when I was eighteen, when I struck
the walnut wood with maul and axe, everything I had to give,
until finally surrendering for him to finish it. I remember once,
we split some hedge wood, and several bats broke out, flying
from the yellow grains into the yellow sun. My father—he loved
the heat of hedge wood from a stove, how hot it burned, loved
fried eggs and leather boots and his children—quiet. It was hard
to know what we could say and not say without risking the switch.
What we could believe or not believe, what to ask and not ask.
When I could no longer pretend I hadn’t changed from the son
he knew, I drove my Chevy truck down the gravel road until I hit
asphalt. And I kept driving—further east, past our old church—
past the state line. Like some black bat escaping after the world
split open, and I was free, for the first time, to pursue the sun.
✭
Crawling from the brute,
I live unseen—
like most sons do. Hiding
in trees and fruit.
✭
Luci says skip Arkansas. Meaning, skip our father
who lives there—and not in Heaven. Meaning, we
don’t need to sit for hours in his house slash barn,
talking about nothing. Don’t need to watch him pet
his dog, or pretend to care when he asks about work
or the weather. Don’t need to let him slip into other
kinds of talk, kinds that light us on fire like the Santa
Ynez mountains in Santa Barbara drought. I don’t
believe it’s climate change, he says, it’s punishment—
for all the laws tolerating homosexuals. And what
will either of us say in response? The both of us
cowards, so—nothing. Luci says skip it. Skip him.
Skip talk about church and sin and what the Bible says.
Meaning, this is the best possible way we can love him—
like the switches he made us choose and cut ourselves
before hitting us—it’s the only way he’s gonna learn.
✭
O Mephistopheles, do you hear from Him? Does He ever call
and ask about your life? I've been estranged since the fall
from grace with my own father. O Noctifer, my dejected friend,
I’m sorry you feel so alone. Remember on the beach when
we saw the sunset and you whispered Lucifer? You cried—
said the world calls you Satan now. I recall the tide's
slow crash against the beach and how I held you fiercely.
My father also never calls. And the truth is, I think—
Luci, he doesn't give me any thought. He won't set foot
in California, tells me I'm lost and sin covers me like soot.
We're not so different, you and I. My dear Mephistopheles,
the burden of our father's expectations seem the same. Seem
unable to change their ways. I thought—after Job, the games
were finally done. I had hoped—I'm not sure hope remains.
✭
In grass, among roots,
I live, unseen.
Most sons do—quiet,
small, and mute.
✭
I will not say I speak for God. My words are—my words.
My heart—my heart.
I look like my father, more as I get older, but I am not
my father. My words—
are my words and not God’s. When I was young, my heart
knew that some
words were dangerous—words curious about God’s Word
and who wrote it,
questioning why it made no sense. God’s words, inerrant,
said my father—
and my father spoke for God. My father says God loves
every life but—hates sin.
God’s words, he says. Or my father’s heart. My heart—
unlike my father’s—
declares his words blasphemous. My words—just my words,
unspoken for God,
but spoken for my heart—given to me, by God. My heart—
at last, unafraid to speak.
✭
Last night, I dreamed about my father—
dreams of the Arkansas horizon, orange
sun cresting over the Ozark ridge, color
drawn on everything. Soft dew glistens
atop fields of grass. My father sitting alone
with his dog, reading his worn out Bible.
It felt like the present. I could smell the air.
He asks me, in the dream, if I know God,
if God is still in my heart. And I tell him no.
I say the truth knowing it’s just a dream.
The Lord God Bird resurrected, I hear
their song in the trees. It’s a dream, so
it can be any song I want. It’s a dream, so
my father says ok—and reaches—to kiss me.
