in the deepened plot, black palm
of sky: one night mother-silver,
tonight, full father-gold suspended
there for my taking. I stand visible
outside the hospital, under
its universe-awning: scientists’ relics,
massive wisps of primeval gas, Big Bang’s
night walk away from reasonable
thinking. I want to feel
nothing; only this physical:
wax-star, night-beetle, sky-drum
the leaden axe of cold air
and the earth’s center
candle wick still red, that great
gravitational plow-pull forward
from sky to sky, the roister
of dawn’s birds, then wind
raising its cut glass arms
over these hills. . .
and the physical of my father, carved
permanent as parents are in perfect
shape, burned-in smell
and familial color;
the orbital ingenious curve
of father’s gentle head, framed
and floating from its white
pillow for my phantom grasp
the part of him I want to touch
most. So, when I think
he is going to die, when
I believe the bed in
in the hospital will too become
his body, I resist the whole
of him, placed where we all
started from, as one powerful
dot, distanced and centered at
the end of each morning’s period
typed out, now pore, pinhead,
bedmite, one exhaled atom
and as I see it, reversed
immaculate power above
me, slow galaxy, the child’s
father, father-time, father-
heaven, father-order,
now perhaps retreating back
into his revisionist’s tempest,
my father emerging for air, nominal,
inexact of these sciences, just there
to turn his face toward me again.