by the water’s edge, goodbye to each crushed leaf,

each stain on your strong, dark-white teeth,

each blue curl of smoke that stands there

whole, for a moment, in the air.

What Came Next After Our Father’s Death

His wife was over at the sink, there was bird-

of-paradise outside the thick

ceiling-to-floor windows, and snake plant

and elephant ear, and mother-in-law’s

tongue, my father had taken a breath

and let it out, the skin of his face

glossy as a bare root, yellow-

green-white, like a bone, or an orchid

petal, he did not inhale again,

and his heart beat, and beat, without air, he was a

dead man, his heart beating,

he not breathing. Then there was a hall,

with artificial light, then

an inner room, no window, a lamp

like an oil lamp, and I was with my sister,

as if in a tomb, the windowless room

where the families sat

while the dead were dying, and then sat when the dead

had died, and my sister told me. She told me what

our father had tried to do to her once,

when he was blind drunk, maybe in a blackout,

as if he didn’t know who she was,

when she was fifteen, and he had tried to go on, but she

had hid, then escaped, on the occasion of their first

and last visitation-rights

dinner, after the divorce. As she told me,

we held hands—my left her right,

her right my left, like a folk dance—

my sister, with the power to ensure

that I would not know, during his life,

the worst of our father, that I’d never know him

until he was safely dead, so that for his

whole life I had been safe from the knowledge

of him, and he had been safe from my knowledge of him.

PART TWO

Ghazal Confessional

My grandfather Cobb became fatherless

when he was one week old.

He lay in a bureau drawer. A floor

above him, in boots hole-soled,

his father’s feet hung in the air

below the old hog-rope and the old

attic beam. My grandfather Cobb

was the 8th of 8 children, 8 days old,

born to a suiciding bankrupt, near where

parents, and their children, had been bought and sold.

Cobb meant testicle, and botched,

and black-backed gull.

He grew up, worked, married up,

colted, and foaled,

and he abused. And sent out his son to marry

money—hot for the folderol, cold

to the heiress.

And I was raised in that fold,

⅛ worker—pig farmer—

⅞ capitalist gold.

And for beauty and for sex and for family, I married

a descendant of the Earl of Wold.

Sharon. You thought you wanted to sing not as

one of the Cobbs, but as one of the Olds.

But out of your long life as an Olds,

you have cobbled songs, and John-Hancocked them Olds.

White Boy in Pajamas, Big Sur Inn, Gulf War

It was startling to see him, so close to his bedtime,

a boy in pajamas with a teddy-bear print, he looked