Wrinkled Right Hand,
with your heavy weight of dull iron veins:
Today you find my shoulder through streams of
morning light.

“I need you
my son.”

Do you remember the night
I journeyed to the kitchen to find
A cup of water?

My shoulder was two feet closer
to the earth then,
But you would still plunge down to find it
Anyway.

All of a sudden I saw
the body you belonged to
(that severe, vertical line)
pale green in the light of the clock on the
Kitchen microwave.

Those neon numbers made you look just like
You’d fit perfectly on the arm of
a great alien god.
In fact, I think you ****** the brown
from the freckles on my shoulder
once you found
it.

And what about the Indians and Pilgrims
scotch-taped to the skyscraper cabinets?
All they ever did was
wave down to me with their hands,
fat faces grinning in
two dimensions.

You did not let go while
Your extraterrestrial colleague stashed the *****
behind the Cheerful White Squanto.
Words hovered above the surface
Of my head:

“I need you,
(please don’t tell
your mother)
my son.”

I stopped believing in Martians
And God
When I left for school.
Still, my shoulder follows your familiar pressure to
the piles of wood in
The kitchen cellar.

When you have finally left
and the fury in my shoulder
loosens all the knots,
My hands throw splintered logs through the air
But for a moment I mistake them for
flying saucers.