FAMILIARS
AVAILABILITY
A boy and a deer, a god-boy holding his window, his mirror. Daphne resting in the window and the curve of the boy’s back. The deer’s delicate legs and hooded Orca eyes. Daphne calling her father, she has no father, she has one of many common river gods for a father who does his impotent, peasant best to restore her, his laurel, now no one’s my father, no one’s daughter. The god-boy’s curved back in the sun, the hot cotton, the round womb of my father’s back, my father’s delicate, spotted legs. Daphne resting in her own headlights, the window a mirror, a hot white deer in its laurels. My father’s hot curved back, no one’s father. The train coming from the trees, from the bend in the tracks. My sister and I come from the trees, no one’s daughters. We will destroy my father when it hits, no one’s beside me on the way somewhere. Father in her mirror, in the center, the center not holding, the mirror the deer sees, my sister the deer seen by him and he by her, my daughter father, at the thighs of my father. Apollo possessed to turn asunder the boys at his thighs and fingertips, runs snatching after Daphne, her half-tree, half-lake. He cuts her fingers off and crowns himself, carries not-her, half-her, is her. Victorious, living daughter, his poor peasant best. My sister and I are on our way somewhere, we are coming from between the trees, from the bend in the tracks. We will destroy my father when we get to him, but the deer has already leapt her tracks.
MY FATHER’S CARS
The yellow shirt was real enough for a museum. But nobody made it, the shirt or the shrine. Your useless, failed life making everything nothing. There is that pull, a bucket in a well, dropped down in the middle of the night just to feel something resisting you. Makes you think of wet clothes. Your shirt’s yellow breath with the stain of your skin coming through. Makes you. Makes your headlights pay attention to the middle of the night at its most basic, stripped down to shit, bones actually scraping open the bodies they are in, trying to get free. Bones lit up by your headlights. Black bible next to a key chain with a psalm on it. Something that can’t wash out. I wish we had. I wish dried-on tomato seeds, the spare change jar locked in your room. I wish the shrine, stripped down, falling apart at its most basic, finally slitting open the body it is in, the middle of the night, but nobody made it. Making it makes a fierce bitch out of me. Your ear might hold a sexual shape in my mind. Your body the chemical smell, the metal dash, my broken nose, white greasy towel fresh with blood. The museum of your information just ends up becoming a machine: because I lined up the numbers so tight. Your body the chemical stain, black hair like a bowl of engine oil, I loved you as thinly as a law, but nobody made it.
LANDSLIP
To start, she had rattling plastic fingernails, a miniature handbag dangling from a jump ring on the pinky. She had emphysema, diabetes, eight unopened bottles of Robitussin in her JanSport. She fed feral peafowl with her best friend, a butch dyke, let them talk, thrilling down the long back walk laced with thick fog of jasmine. Honest all-caps perfume of tomato leaf between her long fingers, a Norah Jones CD, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the smell of unwashed bodies and a trail of cockroaches over the yarn bookmark in her bible. Can’t die in a place like this. Come back to plum-stained back walk. The stuck back door, divine music of tinkling cutlery mobile in rain, lace fingers, gentle laced fingers with mine. Whatever was in her going rancid from straight girls suffocating her in their own skirts. A lizard under hot red light in the bedroom, her fingers laced, rattling the rain. The lemon soup viscating. Our unopened waters, unopened hands. An afternoon nap on the hot red deathbed.
MY WIFE TELLS ME THE SUN RISES IN THE EAST
It’s just begun to embarrass the eucalyptus who slept naked and now a door has opened from a room with an overhead light on this early? Some monster, apparently from the east. We’ve become accustomed to the rattling of a loose screw in the dining room ceiling’s heat register, so that now when the whole operation gets going, the effortful breath of the false air through the yawning, invisible tubes and the click of some small metal tongue inside the yellowed plastic thermostat, it all has the effect of a hearth blaring open to hold us this morning as it always does if we ask it to, and the screw has settled down so now it’s just an ambient beige noise behind the ceiling and all around, Jesus’ Son in her lap, Lucia Berlin in mine. She does enjoy a sense of ownership over the morning since it’s true I often pull the red blanket over me when the dog starts castaneting her miniature muscles, willing us to open our eyes and party with her about this impossible luck from the east she probably smells on the yawning eucalyptus long before the light and the heat have rounded the rooftops, the power lines, the slats of the blinds, the lathe and plaster, the false muntins in the fogged-over double-paned windows, the chair legs and table legs, the jailhouse bars. Even before we are dunked back into another somehow survivable American calendar day, she is dancing all over our shoulders with such spasmodic joy, the light’s very daughter, who still chooses us if we ask, rattling over our unwilling corpora, true it’s usually my wife who gets up, and puts on her robe and opens the door and takes both of them out into the blast where one thinks why do we ever even go inside at all, we ought to sleep outside, why do we even have a house, and then the burr of dad across the mind, for he oftendidn’thave a house and slept outside I know not but surmise, maybe hemade a friend or sucked someone offfor admittance to the indoorsto resteast or west of who among usthen slept in our houses. To whom do we orient the directionof dad who, now that I mention it, neveragain will sleep in a box of windows, table legs, a box of women holding, jailing, for my brother and I released him into a bend in the riverwith the gracious monster settingin the westso triumphantly, it was a kind of closure I suppose, the womb-rose color of the skywhen we tipped the plastic bag of ash and quite possibly the son of Jesus himself went everywhere else.
