was tricked by a minister at the river,
waded into the current to be baptized.
There, knee deep in bilge, all my shortcomings
were forgiven, my doom made certain.
Nothing miraculous can be forestalled.

My father became the glorious red-tailed hawk
on the edge of a rancid dumpster,
the twentieth century.
Still, he square danced with my mother
every Saturday when someone booked

a caller, drifted from the dance floor
into an orchard and conceived a family
on a bed of constellations, the streaming hair
of apple trees, while all those men and women
who danced simply faded from the planet.

Funny. Our kitchen table had a pine veneer.
My father polyurethaned three extra coats.
It was like staring at a felled tree in a shallow
bend in the river every time
we sat down to pray.

All of this I’m remembering now, at a desk,
peeling an orange,
as the universe gets its virginity back
to lose again during the next meteor shower.
We may be reborn like this, although

most of us end up mounted to the wall
in a museum like a dull axe, as forgotten
and worthless as a coin buried in the hillside,
our bodies cursed or filled with baptismal light.
Only invisible things are worth weeping for.

6

  

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