I make my daughter see a gnarled tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.  I look at my father and commit my face to memory.  I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.  I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.  thirty seven when my son graduates from gag to blindfold and wants to know why it rains but never snows blood.  when I learn from an owl of my daughter’s aversion to pillows.  god is more and more the map he left in the kitchen drawer of a dollhouse.  I shoot into the air a rubber band given to me by an alcoholic relative recovering from the time I called the white of my eye the ******’s acre.  my wife is holed up in an outhouse shunning her diet of run-on sentences about the Qibla.  I don’t have an answer but change it.