I’ve known some men. There was the one who dressed in wool suits, joined the circus at night & ate fire. There was the anthropology professor. The one I wish I had said—Yes, too, there was the one I watched canoe down a city street. That summer the weather was named after one. Harvey. There was the Chicano elder who introduced me to Baldwin, Fanon, X. There was the relative who said. Your laugh. Too loud. No man will want—No man will take—Though he wanted. Though he took. Some should’ve gone to jail. Some should’ve enjoyed a prison of one. There was Mister Piche. Pronounced Pee-Shay. Tenth grade honors lit. Girls’ school. Best teacher ever. Really. I was at the airport waiting for a flight when he phoned. He was upset I kept addressing him by his first name. Sixty years of tobacco in his lungs & a breathing machine on his back, he said—Why do you keep—Can’t you call me—I was concerned about the flight. How to get from one concourse to the next. Not the man who now wanted to be known as father. But hadn’t earned the title. Low man on totem pole. Take it like a man. A good man is hard to find. There were the poets. There was T. There was A. There was the photographer & wine connoisseur. She wasn’t a man but acted like one. Took that fruit inside my chest &—Well you might know the rest. They say a woman will always search for her father in a mate. I say mind your own business. I say remember that adage about the monkey & the show. The winter was unseasonably warm when they lowered the man who wanted to be known as father into the ground. The thawing grass. The birdsong. Made it all less somber. At least this is what I imagine. I wasn’t there. I was never there—

1.   
She was no taller than the children, 
who would eventually be able to look down  
upon the oiled braids tied with black cloth, 
and greased strings threading her earlobes. 
If she’d worn jewelry, it would have been to a church. 
Still, we couldn’t imagine her in those churches, except 
to see her brother off, laid in land the Methodists owned.   
Or for her wedding—but that had been a small gathering 
at the wooden shack whose dark rooms promised adventure. 
In one corner, the iron bed surfaced in daylight, pulling  
all the worn contents of the room toward it, then sank again  
in evening, like our astral bodies dragged by an undertow.   
Grandmama, little pirate, burying the children  
under quilts and old coats, weighting our slumber with 
leftover clothes of the stubborn dead, seeding our dreams with  
haints hiding under the house, pacing the yard, perching in trees.

2.    
The green truck poised over roiling traffic  
beneath the bridge’s guardrail,  
father dead drunk, wedged behind the wheel. 
Whispers as we feigned sleep—hurt deciphered from garbled cries. 
Grandmama and mama’s prayers that brought him back  
despite ours.

Given that you are the object 
of the emperor’s touch; given that you object

to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject 
shame of a body entered by another body’s object

permanence; given shame’s objective; 
given your maiden name and the object

of the game: may everybody know, but nobody object— 
the emperor is your maker. And you—his subject

of rule—have tried to say it true, only to be subjected 
to a cruel inheritance in which memory is the subject

of a sentence the mind cannot objectify 
long enough to hold, but holds true enough to subject

all touch to this kingdom of touching, this abject 
poverty of care dressed as care itself—you slept, objectively,

in your emperor’s bed. The rest is subjective, 
but it was no rest.