Turntable, and: In a Drowned Forest You Find Your Father

Turntable

I allow myself a two-step underthe drum line's bass

where gyration plays through the creaseof funk bodies.

King and queen of the co-opgrind to the stage front;

a whimpering dog head emerges from my dusty heart.

Parents, in their fused imagination,hardened heels,

once dreamed of Alaska,what might grow from tundra.

By the time I could see,they were already strangers

and I grew separate eyes in which to gather them.

To believe they were more, to knowthey crossed limbs to make me—looked for me

in the others' tanned features—I kick up a never known truth in my dance:

what beguiles me backwardis the same rough pavement they rode

on a needle, carving sound from a single rut.

In a Drowned Forest You Find Your Father

A hundred times, we've flipped to the end of the album,the cellophane's gumption lost—yellowed andsplit in a hurry to find ourselves in the shot—

then one day, as if it's taken twenty years to develop,you see your father in the pile of driftwood,so many white logs piled on each other, they fill the square,

intricate geometry of gaunt wood, and he, in the center,blue checked flannel discernible only because you are searching,again, this last memory of coastal highway,

the dark gasp of oxygen as you drove through the trunk of a redwood,raised then collapsed the mustard canvas of the tent,pinched the bait as the hook eased through,

until you ended up here at another trestle-crowned beach,where the river flows both ways to meet the tide,opening and closing its freezing lips over your small toes,

up to the flax-dusted thighs you hug your arms around,teetering at the apex of the warmed trunk beneath you,because you were there too, in this rectangle of decimated forest,

across from father, not really looking at him, but relaxed near,two human animals, held in gloss ink over cotton fiber,a rare gristle holding to a country of bone.