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“I have hardened my heart only a little.”
                                  —Robinson Jeffers

His body browned from working in a heat
that blistered paint and cooked the summer grass
to needle sharp, my father climbed the rungs
of wet metal up to the fiberglass

cat’s tongue above the public swimming pool.
Chlorine singed my nose, dyed my sisters’ hair
from blond to seasick green, and horseflies bit
us as they swarmed the heat-thinned humid air.

But it was worth it all to see my father
dive. He, before the cancer wormed its way
out of his menthol smokes into his lungs,
pushed a shovel all week, then Saturday

Votes piled up like wrecked
cars until I realized no path would open
last night and I said: He’s not my President,
as if I were a country unto myself.
I crave peace, I say, as I begin to hate.

Fear stalks the back alleys of my body
like gangs of skinny 15-year-old boys,
their backpacks filled with homemade bombs.

It was a small shop: one barber chair,
one barber, three magazines in front
of the plate glass windows—True,
Field & Stream, America. The middle
son washed the windows every week.
The men who sat worked at the plant,
drove truck, drilled a few teeth,
sold quality suits, used cars and cuts
of meat, painted houses, stole.
You can learn a lot by holding
a man’s head in one hand
and a razor in another. The sins
dripped out of the stories they told
like honey. Most were used to a kind

With its many brooms
              the cold breeze is sweeping
red leaves from
                         the halls of sky. 

I just             opened the can of worms that will eat my flesh
I just             shrugged it’s all good and my nose started Pinocchioing
I just             passed my annual physical and failed my annual spiritual
I just             peeked into my closet and one of its skeletons whispered It’s me, Uriah

Between retirement and bereavement
come autumnals, the gilded leaves
shekels in crisping-pins;
puffed up sparrows on outmost branches;
quests for surety.

But uncertainty is also a catechism—
our brief expanse
the willowy lights in late October
flickering, blurring day
from shadows descending.

But keep your reflections calm, see a pond
become an opalesque canvas
where fish create expanding circles,
their fins sleeking like angel wings,
a world yet to be.