Resurrections
The first time your father left me
I left him a letter on a summit
far from home, my ballpoint prayer
slipped into a tin box already stuffed
with a hundred others.
Mt. Olympus just one godly
vertebrae rising up along the spine
of Utah. Your father’s plane touch-
ing down in Texas. No return
address, so how could I have
believed in the Eternal Return
of us? All the way down
the slit-eyed sun hemorrhaged its last red
into the salt lake of Brigham Young.
When will our kingdom come?
I am no mountaintop prophet.
I heard no truth
but the empty gaping of the stars,
their light frozen and long expired:
more Hail Mary than Hallelujah.
(This was before your time.)
I cannot help but mythologize
my ordinary pain. Isn’t religion
holding other people in your heart? So
I cannot help but miss
the nameless you. Nothing to do
but trace the worry
beads of homespun aphorisms:
No need to justify your existence, when
you are already here.
Is it too much to mention the way
your parents turned like disobedient
falcons, how we spun ever-masturbatory
spirals in a widening gyre?
Beware feedback loops that strangle
like a noose. The sleepless day
I drove back West, I sought
to quarantine the airbubble
around my heart. Until your father’s breath
trickled back through speakerphone
perforations, until his voice re-
cracked my ribcage into two
bone-white wings, bound for the Lone Star
state. Everything boxed and shipped
piecemeal despite my mother’s
protestations. “Do not leave me
for that childish dream you call
love. Nobody will ever love you
like your mother.” Isn’t religion
all about sacrifice?
(You should have been loved).
Your father greeted me with a bouquet
and a rented pickup truck, draping a chain
around my neck, his grandma’s necklace
a promise. Sailing down the interstate
we chortled like teenage boys, irreverent
at the sign of the Kum & Go, not realizing
the prophecy laid at our feet. I am ready
to merge but there are certain things he cannot
give and despite saying
suffering doesn’t make saints
we believe that it does. Creatures suffer
when their environment exceeds
their adaptations. In the Texas freeze
the cacti are no longer piercer, but pierce-ee–
flesh betrayed by the self from the inside out,
what was once precious for survival now
spiked into ice. What got you here
won’t get you there. Trauma can be written
into our genes, they say. Yet still too I see
amnesia amid the carcasses: fresh
green plates already reaching
skywards.
(You would’ve been born in spring.)
When you look too closely at your fear, there
you will be. Another split and months later I am
watching Manhattan’s glass teeth devour
the sun, only to gleam bloody again
the next morning. Parallel
peregrinations and somehow
here we are all over again: I saw
your father’s ghost trailing my heels
when all along he was right
across East River. And if I’m honest I’d still
cross the Lethe for him, forgetting
the truth of our diverging roads, just so
I could break for him
anew. No one can save you
from yourself.
(You might’ve saved me, the way
I’d once saved my mother.)
What did my parents, his parents—
our chained quartet—what did they know
of love? Nothing but circumstance,
opportunity, and regret. Fate being
the absence of control. Both of us
no longer children, we expected
better, but the same
could be said of us: how each of
our leavings was but foreplay for
a mechanistic rejoining, preordained
despite our best plans, and perhaps
to spite them too.
(You were my daughter, I think.)
That night your father
and I met like a Möbius strip, one more
frantic timely collision against
Time. Man and woman,
sperm and egg, opposed polarities
suddenly fused. And there
you were: accidental proof
of object permanence,
or at least until
we hurricaned you out,
along with my capacity for
the written word. Still, isn’t religion
all about faith in the resurrection?