It must have been hard for him on days 
when the sun hit the muddy delta, 
sending up what smelled like failure, 
rotten and man-made. Still, he drove 
his old, rusty car down Pacific to 
the college, where he sat by those 
half his age who knew little of how 
they would begin, how easily beginnings 
turn into a thousand dark miles of water.
But they knew school, much more about it
than he did-which words to use when, 
how to give nothing but the requirement, 
to hide between clauses and commas.
This was his mistake of the essay 
called “What Life Means to Me”:

         My shadow on the ocean’s face, the frayed 
         water behind a boat. Rainbows and valleys 
         and leis for my daughters, that they forgive 
         me for leaving and all that I couldn’t give.

Some nameless face read through it, asking 
for predicates, circling fragments, then went on, 
knowing our father’s tears, yet deeming them
unremarkable. I can see his hands thumbing 
the red-marked page, searching for a glimpse 
of understanding and finding none, his face 
burning with shame for not knowing how much 
it would take to begin again, to go back across 
the water. He must have left that day thinking 
he had to work even harder for our love, to be 
a real father, responsible and clean as grammar.

WHEREAS when offered an apology I watch each movement the shoulders
                        high or folding, tilt of the head both eyes down or straight through
                        me, I listen for cracks in knuckles or in the word choice, what is it
                        that I want? To feel and mind you I feel from the senses—I read
                        each muscle, I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem.
                        Expectation’s a terse arm-fold, a failing noun-thing
                        I scold myself in the mirror for holding.

                        Because I learn from young poets. One sends me new work spotted
                        with salt crystals she metaphors as her tears. I feel her phrases,
                        “I say,” and “Understand me,” and “I wonder.”

                        Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption.
                        Echo.

                        If I’m transformed by language, I am often
                        crouched in footnote or blazing in title.
                        Where in the body do I begin;

I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?