After Years Thinking about Dying
I search for my father in Paris. I look
for him in people drizzled by the rain.
In the apartment on Quai d’Anjou, David,
who is like a father, sits with his coffee
at the dining table. He sits in my mind,
and I hear him, like a memory, asking us
to go, and smoke, a cigar on the Seine.
I search for Hemingway and for Pound.
Search for Steine and Ford and Picasso,
rain falling on Rue de l'Odéon. I search
for Howard, who is also like a father,
in cathedrals. I search for him, like I do
for God—that is, constantly. A priest,
another Father, sings over communion.
God like a ghost, like an apparition—
my Heavenly Father’s hands rest soft
on my head, voice echoing in my ear.
Love washes over me and fills me up.
My fathers, in Paris, all sing of miracles.
And what a miracle, O God, I am here.
What a miracle, my resurrection. Moss
growing abundant on the stone walls
of the Seine. And me, a grateful witness.
Exiting Lines
When I’m old or not old, when death comes, when death meets me
in person, me possibly shitting my pants, maybe I’ll remember taking
a shit in Rochefort-en-Terre, in the public restroom across from Notre-
Dame de la Tronchaye. Maybe I’ll remember the coldest porcelain seat
of my life, remember it like my sexual awakening. On the train to Rennes,
the French countryside reminds me of the Ozarks. Different, yes—cute
towns instead of trash dumps for yards and Dixie flags on their houses,
their cars, their t-shirts. Sometimes I wonder why France looks like France
and Missouri looks like Missouri. I wonder if Missouri will exist when I’m old,
if America will exist when I’m old, if I will ever grow old—like leaves turning
in November. Death coming for all their little lives, falling (breaking free?)
from the tree which continues on to spring, new buds and new leaves,
and France—once again, as always, is beautiful. I wonder if I’ll age enough
so there comes a spring I won’t live to finish, when death finally arrives
for a small coffee and a smoke, maybe a cafe in Reims, a warm day where
hopefully, I’m not shitting my diaper, and instead, me—thinking about how
far I’ve come, how many lives I’ve lived, how many times I’ve watched
Grace Kelly in The Rear Window, her voice in my dreams since I was eleven,
awakening me for a good long conversation, and Death, who has always
been so beautiful, sits and smiles and says—I love funny exiting lines.
Quiet
I must be one of the quietest animals on earth.
Maybe a sloth or a giraffe, maybe a rabbit.
When I look out my hotel window at Vientiane,
I think about my life as a child. My memories so very quiet,
like Kansas countryside, fields of milo and soybean and wheat.
My father never speaks in them. And I never speak in them.
When I moved out at eighteen, my father, frightened, said
the world was hard and I’d probably need to come home.
My father spoke in challenges—so I moved farther and farther away—
both in the distance between us and what I believed.
I find the world so very different from what he claimed—
nāga and buddhas, tuk-tuks and diesel—
Christ, nowhere to be seen or found.
The stray dogs wandering the street,
somehow survive and ask
when I can’t ask for anything—not my wife, for her body
or my father, for him to call. When I saw butterflies
in the Buddha Garden alight from bougainvillea
to bougainvillea, whispering small secrets to the flowers,
I whispered too, quiet like a song or chant—
Om Mani Padme Hum. And in my next life, I pray to have a father
who loves me. I ask for the wherewithal to speak up.
To be a lion or Coqui frog—a cicada, a howler monkey, maybe a wolf.
No more whispers or small prayers or opinions you can’t hear.
Me, howling to the moon all my secrets.
My father howling back. My father howling back. My father howling back
to the whole world how much he loves me.
