For My Father

Dear Pop, This is a happy birthday letter for a man for all reasons:
His thought speeding like Apollo's shaft
Cuts through the tropics of the mind
Leaving the Garden of Eden guacamole for those who come after.

A young God who leaves his foes stunned on the canvass
Floor of a ring on the deck of a giant battle wagon.
There they dream of Kansas and endless avenues of corn.
Heedless beneath these contestants
Leviathan lunges toward Japan.

Friend of black widows and silk spiders
You walk through forests and over mountains.
Never far from Hemlock boughs,
You sip the scream of things to come
And fall down dead for hours.

You nurse the wounds of Judas
And mind the petals of broken flowers.
You dance and sing and find yourself
At home among the monsters.
You mix memory and desire
In a living cup.
You guide the fronds of each day's end
And bend them back
Toward the true crucible,
The human form.

Master alchemist, tyrant, teaser, Master Preshy, Percy and Peach,
Mama's boy, Knight errant in a foreign land.
Close your eyes now
And open them again and see once and for all
That all your days have been spent in praise
Juggling the oxymoron of mortality.


JUNE 1989