For years I’d kept you below ground, wishing you’d go on

And grow into rock, then fossilize. The shame, self-hatred,

Still lingered. Nothing was hard enough for me to hit

My head on. I was a cur, I was foul-blooded, held

In the suspended animation of my latest goodbye when you removed

The guesswork and with much gravitas called it unrepeatable

Called it immortal. I was silent then, somewhere in the clone factory

Watching the fucking science make a man out of me.

I was trying to take the trash out. I was trying to ignore my email

And clean the grout and the adjacent porcelain, singing,

In a high pitched voice, little sounds any fleshy bird could make.

But the world quieted in my father’s house.  The sighing cloud cover

Was what I noticed once I got my head screwed on. Seam, invisible.

You fell upon me like white seeds undoing themselves midair.