Father, Son
- Father, Son
To think, we listened to the cement’s wet hand squeeze hard into a fist. You told me it was like fire, once, how an orphan fawn would descend from the huckleberry in the dark and rest its white belly on the pour, my brother’s arrow splintered through its loins. I said the Romans used volcanic ash, and lime. You said things aren’t supposed to last forever, accidentally pointing through my heart, and kept going, telling me that a shadow is but the tardiness of a wish, dragged like an open pouch, worn to merely nothing with age, empty, meant to happen. [End Page 121]
C. L. O’Dell’s poems are published or forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Texas Review, among other journals. He received an M.A. at Manhattanville College, where he served as Poetry Competition Editor of Inkwell. Currently, he is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
