Dreaming the Places My Father’s Tongue Has Been In Summer

Those goddamn lonely moments when I address him in the orchard

of his blue eyes, I ask him to tell me one unwholesome thing, and he

deflects. I remember being the only one watching moon color clinging

to the shoreline (white hairs flat against my legs). Somehow I knew what

to notice about the heat of summer crouching in corners, and there I found

a good and satisfying fear. His rugged forehead taught me to be incandescent

with the promise of exception. And still I wish to speak some loose sentence

in the orchard, in the office, in the gliding car: What is love? Is it piston motion? Is love

a warm and quiet mouth? So I have inherited his tiny throat, squeezing food

like a fist. Now home could be a folding of wings, some calculated sentiment.

I remember his hands holding a map like smoke, my body strapped in the backseat becoming the shape of a girl, becoming the shape of a spare and exceptional girl.

Practicing

The little god of unreachable eyes elsewhere is quiet tonight as I occupy myself

with earthly things: checkbook and cold tea. Outside heaven pants and TVs glow

inside pink-cheeked houses all along the avenue.  We get one chance

in this generous life to steer our young desire, to cultivate anything at all.

All morning the sky was a wool bath, edges of buildings gone fuzzy, trees

and children all vague. These days I am taming the feral love of distances

and the weird lust of everyday. I am soothing the hook of sleep with the beauty

of small pharmaceuticals, and I am learning how much space is inside a name.

I say “these days” to set them apart from the staggering importance of those days

because the now is never suitable. The humming lights of now will never do.