My Father Full of Light
Michael Dickman
from The End of the West
Tonight the moths are beating the shit out of themselves against
the screen door
It looks like smoke
So does the light
inside his rings, his
wristwatch
The blood swimming around inside his face
in lightning blotches
beneath his skin
like the residue of beets
on a cutting board
also
emitted light
A blizzard of wings
He thinks God
is going to clean
everything up
Hands made from Light and Feathers, moving us around,
dusting us off
Everything
settling back into the warm
colors of autumn
instead of getting
ground down
into glass
which, I get the feeling
diamond after diamond
is what's really
going to happen
I could have
whatever I wanted
once a year
Whatever you want
it's on me
Coconut cream pies rotated slowly behind bright windows like
the cities of heaven
The register sang
Flies collected
on our water glasses
My father, for a moment, was full of light
Men came and went
I knew
our waiter was the son
of someone
1 comment:
Well, I'll tell you, Paul, I'm just home from a workshop about the job search process at the local library (where they have the old doorstep from Jonathan Edwards's house by a bench on the side of the building, and reading this, with those big feathery hands and those city of heaven pies, and the father, full of light, it's like getting to swell out into a dimension of myself that felt temporarily flattened.
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