Black Cloth of Sky (seen through a Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle)
father dreams drunk dreams lucent hours of lying on his back
dreams of hollow logs of decades to crawl inside & he speaks
with a clot of a tongue & he converses with his own thoughts
& he argues with every chimney smoke of memory then sometimes
he leans in the doorway of the boys’ bedroom or he leans
in the doorway of his daughter’s room & he thinks
here is the slow mire here is the incorporeal past & once he drove
as a young man down from ohio to mississippi & he gazed
at the flatness of the gulf & he thought if i walked out
on the plains of these waters i would sink if i dipped my head
beneath the waves i would swallow salt & once in his 20s he stabbed
a man who punched him & the man became another inescapable map
some geography of fury & father dreams anger dreams a red wraith
of sky dreams blood horizons & he skips years likes stones
across each imaginary ocean & he lies beside his wife at night
& listens to the ships of her breaths & those ships say
this is my leakage & these are my sails & those ships say we carry the years
like a withering then father drinks on the back porch drinks
in his pickup drinks at the kitchen table drinks beneath the stars
& the stars say this we know . . . the visible & the invisible are at war
