I have my father’s eyes, mist shrouding sea-cliffs,

and the weight of his gifts

like a strangling cloak.

My father is a phantom, a whisper, an instinct.

He’s the shove that turns me

as arrows zing past my chest.

He’s the warning image-blast of two abandoned war-machines

unfolding their spindly metal limbs

from the hillside a mile out of town.

He’s the picture in my mind of two teachers

gossiping their trepidation at how my long limbs fill a desk

so I can clean trust tarnished by my surname

with banana bread and offered hand.

Whenever anyone says I have the same quirk to my mouth,

that my talents make the same mage-light geometry glow exponential,

my mother beside me goes motionless

like a ghost’s illusion

hanging in the air. I’ve glimpsed in frescoes

how he puppeted the world.

The vortex his cries sang,

tentacles splitting the seas.

I build a mortared wall between myself and remembering

how easy it is to grasp power. How I could expand

like a breath into everyone’s lungs.

I grow jewel-bright wildflowers in painted terracotta,

press them between the pages of history books.

Tutor children

who beam gap-toothed up at me when they sound out a word.

When drunk neighbors’ carelessness

rages beer bottle and firepit spark

through my summer garden, I bend to replanting.

I twist the fishhooks that tether me to life’s rhythms

smile relief when they pull at my skin. When my mother finds me,

dust a coating on my hands

instead of blood.

I could have made them eat the littered glass in handfuls

like a bag of chips.

I can lattice out anyone’s memories

except how the man who hoped for me

like soft fall rain

died howling, ordinary knife at his own throat.

What cracks me like a kicked-over flowerpot is

if I followed his path to the cliff’s edge of power

where innocence is the churning sea that breaks below

unheard against the rocks

he’d turn back and smile,

beckon me on,

that even knowing how he died

I’d join him just to feel

my hand in his.