1.The scene: a hangar. Father and I in a two-seater. One asleep, the other onfire.                                                      2.I hunger boyward for those days.Like a handslapping still water, stirring up the night silver waiting in the shadows, I wait tilla man in a wife-beater shirt appears —            king of grunts,                        poor baby-man can’t dress himself orally                                         (got him. pretty good burn, right? got him a good                                                      one).If I could breathe him in again I could almost smell              the hot Cain seed that,outfleeing its brothers and sisterswas the only one to emerge screaming into a sea of photons,the parentless light of the world . . .I’d know again the mattress we slept on in the emberless dark.feel again the curvature of space each time he rolled over                      in the oversoft bed, releasinga smell of heavy road machinery, of freshly overturned earth.I was slant and hold-on, afraid.Not that one can sink into fathers;They’re vertical.A mud-splattered bulldozer awaited himin the morning dark and cold.Coming back from work dusty, he napped on                 the trailer house sofafive feet from the piano keys I hammered,getting ready for my next lesson.Uncomplaining he was, this unacknowledged Nation Builder.Broken eggs in a nest, his feelings were unknown to him.I never knew what mountains lay his snows,in what rivers ran his sorrows.Lonesome as a rock he was, not lit up from within ….What more did I want of him?Santa Ana winds, great warmth, madness in the air?Yes, of course.Failing that, just once to call me “buddy,”as I heard a father address his boy today,astounding my heart.                                                      3.Years later, after work one day, he was                    hit by a coronary comet as he lay on the sofa                    and rolled off as if spat onto the trailer floor…                                                      4.You will wonder where all this is going.              Oh, the Bedients aren’t the going kind.                                                      5.If time were a letter that never enters the light,being would be an illness (is being an illness?),a loudspeaker between two trains,like a wife too unplaced in her mindto want a place in her husband’s bed.                                                      6.Hark, from the other bedroom a scream,as of a soldier shot in a dark battlefield.She rises and turns on the TV in the living room.Watches a show punctuated by canned laughter.It begins to mock her, raising the hair on her neck.(You see, I knew her. Perhaps I was her? Oh, stop that now.)                                  “Turn that off!”What has the male voice said from the enclosed set                                  cunningly wired to spy on her?Witness the things her uncle Clare asked her to do             when she was six and assigned to his care —her father having died of the Spanish flu.One day, holding her niece on her lap                       in her house across the streethis estranged wife discovered the syphilis sores.A shot rang out when the police knocked on his door.She sometimes hears it now in the middle of, or before,her shrieks.Oh, will no one give her safe conduct back to bed from which first a man, then a child, had fled?                 Appendix:I give you this poem carved on an ice-cube, unhappy mama.I write it with a hand shaking in the wave-propagation of light.Gravel is the way. Love reaches you on torn knees.“My son, be violently creative, if you must,but know that it is terrible to be human.”Yes, mama. I understand.