Daddy came into my dreams last night,

His first visit since his passing.

He arrived in the red Jaguar coupe, the XKE.

In the cockpit, we kicked up the gravel,

As he spoke of some old feller he knew back when.


The torque of the engine pushed me into the leather

As we rounded tight curves.

I caught a whiff of Old Spice,

And, saw, once again the confident glimmer of his smile

As he steered into the dusty red arc of the bright afternoon.

Always leaving, he left me again, on the edge of the bright road,

In the tall greenness of wild grass bent double by the sun.


Years before, Mother laughed and looked away, told me,

“Your daddy could always find his way back to any place he had ever been.

It was a gift of his.”

In my dream he glances back as the heat of the late day takes him,

Disappearing again over a hill among the dusty pines

Into the distance, toward other roads he’s learned to know,

Far beyond the follies of memory and time.


And I am astonished at his willingness to disappear.

Everything in me that I know begs to follow and discover with him

The true course of his vanishings.


Deep inside where it counts so much,

I have never been sure of much of anything,

But if I’ve ever been sure of anything,

I have to be sure that he will remember how to get back to this road,

Someday, and that when I meet him he will take me on along with him

As if in this dream, into the sun of a dusty afternoon,

Dazzling, dark, dreadful, deadly, kind, beautiful, together.