But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise

I Meet My Father at the End of America

12 I Meet My Father at the End of America Largely as he had painted it: a bismuth yellow field of chuckle-colored barns upturned as if shook down from a beach bucket above. In his hand, return passage to Maastricht. He intends to sail backward into himself. How easily I glide to him & we stand together. A fair daughter from an even fairer son. He scarcely seesaws his wrist over herds of ghostly beasts. Once this. Once that. His palm directing my eye to the melting light of skeletal New Harmony, the shining white waapaahšiiki, 13 its bloated banks & the river road trees bent with webworm in late summer when leaving is led by one’s own shadow. —after Bin Ramke ...