My Father’s Voice

I was searching all night for my father on a network of narrow streets

but I could never read the signs.

Now here he comes in a glitter of far water where the sun unscrolls its

tongue along the reach.

My father slept all night in the mouth of the sun, and now

he’s coming toward me over the water, black as a cinder and thin.

I spread his ashes in a cold, blue lake,

but the ashes were only the outermost part of him,

his inessentials, as it were. The pith of him

is burnt and living and coming toward me over the water.

If he were going to speak, would he speak a language

of thunderclaps and rockfalls?

Or would his voice creak and dither like a tired crow’s?

Would it carry all the colors of the inferno—orange blues, dead reds,

fish flake-gray, the saffron of a cleansing flame?

My father’s black hand in my diaphragm, like an anchor.