In a photograph, my father

I. In a photograph, my father:

skin red from the sun,

his sky-blue shirt

hangs open, his eyes

wide open and calm.

He looks at the camera

like he can see who sees him:

on and on his eyes

on an ocean of time,

the sinking and his sunburnt

lines.

II. A group of kids had found him

for their scavenger hunt:

they laughed and took his picture.

I don’t know --

he doesn’t know, either --

what item they thought him.

He looks through the lens,

like all of us, wondering

how did this happen?

And will the end be just

as surprising?

(Begun 8 June 2005 [!], revised 19 April 2006, revised again on Father's Day 2013. This little ekphrasis really is in response to a photograph, and there really was a scavenger hunt. How a scavenger list predicted or accommodated my father is anyone's guess.)

An Iowan brown

Brown like the shadowed undersides of overpasses,

they flicker: a flock of birds against clouds

of glistering, oil-barrel ashes, clouds

of poured concrete, still drying, like drops

of water from rusted metal, a post-

industrial leap of muscle and friable

bones from earth and electrical wires

to the sky.

In a seemly rush they are flying

away from the blue and deepening blush

of rain.

(And on the same stiffening wind,

a drift of distant cows: a waft

as faraway warm and soft as each mildering

roadside farm, each squat and sagging

building rotting like an unpicked fruit:

a red body sickly sinking to the ground,

its skin giving way, in the "smokeless burning

of decay" -- of time -- to a fine, compostible brown.)

(Found and finished 9 June 2013 while following I-80 from Chicago to Omaha, first via a lovely Y-shaped flock of birds flying north across the highway ahead of a tremendous cloudburst, then remembering the astonishment of a friend -- who had recently driven across the Midwest for the first time -- at the industrial remains of the 'Rust Belt'. The quotation is from Frost, "The Wood-Pile".)

Four Midwestern views

I. Every so often, an ivyless tree:
they might seem barest for wanting that scaling,
enameling green,

but the birch is fairest to me: its skin,
like yours, my dearest, a papery white
and black pepper into cream.

Or so I believe, for nights like whispering
ivy, nights like obligatory fig leaves,
kept true colors unseen.


II. A tree, trunk split
like a rod for finding water had been planted in the earth
in the shadow of a crystalline cellular tower --
a rigid and uncompromising metal structure --

its branches like languid rivers bridged
in diamonds of darkened ebony and alabaster:
a tree like the evening before, but already

there comes, obscuring
the sun, the morning after.


III. A cloud foregrounded in passing: a dragon,

its massive jaws open, its right nostril smoking

in anticipation of air turned to flame,

back arching and bearing its squamous way down

on a knight -- like a lightning

strike to a tree --

who is found all shaking, his mail gone to flickering 

scales, in the salivary

rain, of leafy

green.


IV. "What you don't see is her riding the dragon."



(Found and finished 1 June 2013, in pieces on a drive from Rochester, NY, to Chicago, across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The day had a high albedo -- it was bright but clouded -- and so seemed conducive to reflection. The quotation constituting the fourth 'view' is due, with gratitude, to an astute reader of poetry, with a specialty in such metamorphoses as might take place in [stories about] the heavens and the trees.)