My father said the most wicked among us were the petty bourgeois
               and the Republicans of the black lakes of all that filched money
                           and me sometimes was how it felt

when I was a kid in Daddy's slapdash house of divorce and dejection
               with no way of knowing what kind of girl to be
                           and the point is Daddy didn't know either

and wept drunk on the porch because of it sometimes
               until he remembered Rembrandt and Van Gogh
                           and woke up the buoyant maestro again

on the sexuality of the Hominid and the evil of the Klan
               and the sway of Dada and the problem of Iran.
                           Now Daddy sits in bars in Spain and France

and drinks a beer in Venice and calls on Sunday from Ireland
               to ask me to please tell him in a text or less
                           what kind of girl I am

and all I know is soon will come the contagion winter
               and soon the winter of the father departed
                           and he always promised we'd go fishing.

He would sit in his chair and he would light a cigarette.
               He would curse the starlings for scaring the songbirds
                           and cross his heart and hope to die if I would ask him to

and I'm the kind of girl who would always ask him to
               and he would do it and sing about the bones of chickens
                           in the bellies of foxes until the gorge got dark

so yes I must record the gist of that darkness
               and the buoyancy and the sadness
                           of that very particular and faraway echoing darkness

when my father would say to go to sleep and dream anything I wanted
               like holding your breath in a way it was or like
                           swimming like some forever raggedy thing forever underwater.