The Father’s heart is a little red car
he parks in the garage with his golf clubs and gun.
he parks in the garage with his golf clubs and gun.
The Father’s heart is his father’s heart in a wheelchair
with a black hat on.
The Father’s heart is a truckload of tomatoes,
a dead Vargas girl tucked
under its mounds of waxy fruit.
The Father’s heart bleeds and bleeds into a glass tumbler.
He drinks it over ice every day at half past five.
When The Father dozes off, the moon creeps up
the walls of his big house, its oleander eye
making the trees flicker outside.
And the leaves
on the ghost trees quiver. He wakes and looking out
sees his children in their green, glowing shapes.
The Father’s heart leaps with longing; it reels,
but the windows are shut, sealed tight.
And nothing, not even his God, gets in.
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