There are nights when I dream.

It’s my father,
and I’m an adult.
And he’s in my kitchen.
So I know I’m dreaming.

And with his fists knotted in his jacket,
he offers a smirk.
“I know what you’ve been up to.”

And he does.

You’ve been saying “heh” a lot.
You’ve been thinking you’re clever.
You’ve been hoping silence equals shrewdness.
(You’re quite taken by the theater of your own anger.)
You keep getting taken by the mechanic.
You’ve been giving the desperate glances of a subway ******.
You’ve been pretending to be a man.
You’ve been hoping someone else will put out the fire.

Now we’re holding a couple of beers by a truck, overlooking a lake.
Inexplicably, we’re going hunting.
“It’s ok.  This is how it is.”
He deliberately checks the sight.

And with the certainty of a father, he tells me he knows.

But I remember it’s a dream,
because he doesn’t.

There was the day that the stroke --just a stroke--
freed her from that dreaming,
lightning freeing the pine
from its impossible salt air climb,
cleaving it to the gravity.

Do we dream of puncturing the salt air, or
do we dream of
the strike, the stroke
the fragrant humus that waits within
to passively, piously
become salt,
electric?

She wanted to tell you a dream
but you wouldn’t let her.
“We can marry when you’re 80.
Then there’ll be nothing to lose.”
Geese do not marry, though
and she wondered if the moon over
the Nile would really be the same
moon as here, tonight.
8 hours, after all, is not 80 years.

It’s not so easy to admit that you’ve been here all along
Like my gnawed fingertips
Like my absence of dreaming
You with your breath and your stars

And your dead brother
Who I missed by a week

Is he the one who showed you how to make an exit?

Have you asked the tightrope walker
where he is going?

over there.

he suggests.


At the airport, I ask you
why you must travel?

to see the world.

you rehearse.


But when you return, you say you will tell me if I am yours.


We gratefully watch the walker’s feet
petals on a necklace

like these words that I
lace around your ears
keeping me alive
high above the ground

Over there.  Eventually, it is true.

As if spoken to you through the back
of your skull,
from below snowpack,
through the bell of time.

A haunting has no language,
though.
A life leaves no heat.
A kiss, no bruise.
So when it walks these halls
during the inverted night
greet it as a guest
who has come to dance.
Do not be so rude as to lead.

We may not deserve it
        but we were given sight and blood
        and soft organs that we know to protect

We may not grasp it
        but we were given faith and song
        and the urge to dance because we tremble

We could not measure it
        but we were given miles for our feet
        and a horizon orienting us headlong

So on this night of
        hemlocks alive with cicada
        moons engulfed in hot orange
        hands seeking each other
        and bite marks
        and hip bones
        breath
        stubble
        and time escaping in astronomical units

Who are we to ask its meaning
with the very words we could
never fully know?