metonymy4u

Against my very will I find myself for home again
trending beyond the river’s expired month and hoping, panicked,
to somehow see again the ocean of my youth. Behind me
my years a dried up whisper, and you my bones in the yard.

Newly dead and with no history I lie face up to an unwashed desert
while a flight of tarnished wings, meaning nothing to my story,
line themselves across the atmosphere

to empty the day at the end of the day. That being said, your

voice in my innocent ear was such that I slid easily
down a waterfall of lies, and saw time as it walked
away from its partner of many years.

Tired work days often end like this:
my sun words dance prayer-like along a beam of light.

And blinded I can barely see the mercy that sends me back
released from a life the moment of pain flanked
on either side by silence. I would
wait up for you nights.

But you’re never coming home are you?

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9-25-15


Dad, everything I see these days seems to remind me of you.
I guess it’s just because at this time last year you
were still alive and I was in Spain wasting what days
I had left on rules and seduction.

Or maybe it’s because I’m spending all this time now
watching your grand-daughter grow up. I wish
I could tell you again and again about how she’s
learning to say my name—you know the one
you picked out for me forty eight years ago.

And though

I can think of you when I want to I still scroll through
saved messages on my phone hoping to hear
your voice out loud once more. I don’t know why
anyone would ever do that. Suppose I could

see you like you were before, I’m thinking you’d
probably seem too distracted—as if you can’t
quite grasp what to say to me and I have
to make my plane or waste a lot of money—

whose sadness were you telling me about? Whose death?
Yours or mine.

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