sits across from me
and passes a photo of his son, pointing out
our somewhere-around-the-eyes resemblance,
 
and in this tall son with dark curled hair, I see
my own unfathered-form and so Charles Uzor
becomes my newest father and there is so much
 
catching up to do. I tried to fix my marriage
and still it collapsed, I tell him, my whole family
has a new frame. Charles Uzor’s face listens
 
dignified by his spectacles and the sunlit window.
There is a marble table between us. On the back of his seat
rests his walking stick and with all his serious years
 
he cracks a joke, pulls a grin and lets in
some silence, telling me that he too knows divorce,
and yes, people assume it’s always the men who
 
walk away. Some people will leave you
says Charles Uzor, and some people will stay
in a different shape. His voice moves me
 
and my neatly-in-the-ground father
loosening the knot in my neck
and for at least as long as I sit facing
 
Charles Uzor’s magnet-black elegance, I am given
rest from the present pain, still tender
in my chest, and I receive a stretch of light
 
which begins and smoothly runs across
Charles Uzor’s ear and chiselled chin and towards
my own face, somewhere around my eyes.

In a poem I love, the husband slices open 
a pepper to find a church, 

but here at the sink I’ve found a house, and 
inside, the rattling seeds of a chandelier. 

It doesn’t matter. My husband is too by himself 
in the hospital, and in our home at the window I stand 

alone for the first time in almost thirty years. Then, 
he’d rushed out into the dark, summoned to 

his father’s deathbed. But I wasn’t really alone. 
My toddler son slept, his mouth slightly open 

and red and wet inside like a fledgling’s, 
my daughter grew within me, close 

as a locket on a chain. When my husband returned, 
I remember he talked of the rattle. The death rattle. 

The children are now inside their own homes
asleep, curled around their beloveds. But all so young 

yet, they do not think we will ever die. 
In their garden beds, if they are dreaming of seeds 

and light, they are dreaming of little blazes
growing hotter. They are not dreaming of wind

and flickering. And, certainly, they are not
dreaming of smoke.

Somewhere in Kansas
a night train torches
through the dark stomach
of the prairie.

The man in the truck
on the rural route
turns his head
for just a moment
and wonders if
he has ever made
his father proud.

But only a moment.
Now he turns from
the disembodied flames.

At the crossroad
he signals left.
The engine hums
the ballad of whatever
comes after.

Once, Dorianne told me
of the moment her mother finally
admitted, apologized even,
for the spotty passage
of her childhood years, how often
they proved a woods rife with wolves
and teeth and trickery enough
to make a girl want to gaze into
the maw of an open oven
and mistake that boundless dark
for a candle. The loveliness I wanted
would have cost my mother
nothing—a thimble of breath, a wisp
of floss the sparrow plucks
from the gutter and threads
into her egg chamber behind
my front porch lamp—or,
the last thumb of indigo milk
tugged from breast before
my mother crunched those lovelies
beyond the borders of her garments,
their nickel hooks and eyes,
her secret queendom—
a language of the body
she was not taught to teach
or promote. Oh fragile basket
we swing through thickets
of time, combing the thorns
for brighter berries
we can crush against our chests
like medals or gauze,
staunching the grief, our yearn
for honesty—for a true line
on the tongue—
how sweet the taste of even one.