Work Text:
The son is the place where the father is buried
but you and I, we don’t have deep roots
and our sod is torn.
The earth is bad, father.
This family is a dust bowl.
If I open my mouth, it will fill with sand.
My eyes are abraded with dirt,
debrided to blindness, and
the path is not clear to me.
I must feel the way on hands and knees.
A father walks bent, but his son crawls,
mud-mouthed, gagging
into the face of the dust, the
blistering expanse of your expectations, the
corpse-dry wasteland of your praise.
(I pick out a quick noise, an errant songbird.
Wind swallows him.
I knew him only a moment—
a child’s yearlong flash of living elation
—and now he is gone.)
I find the grave, vertical,
a slot cut for me in the canyon wall.
I need only walk in,
and I step into the shape of you:
form, father, six feet, two inches,
warm rock arms, dead and enclosing,
a whisper in my ear, saying,
‘You forgot to close the gate, boy.
The stock will roam.
They’ll spoil your mother’s garden.’
The ‘You never learn’
goes unsaid, and I don’t tell you that
mother is long dead,
the garden flat and black, and
that cattle stand frozen in the dust,
racks of bone I could not keep alive.
We cut one open and
its lungs and stomach were packed with dust.
It died choking.
My brother cried to see it.
You could not keep the sod down, father.
You did that.
You did that.
You did that you did that you did tha