Father breathes himself into a yard, breathes himself larger at the edge of my tongue, breathes himself into a bang in the muzzle of a six-gun. Such is the world. Flash. Recoil. Quiet. He then sleeps and sleeps on the lawn, his body an exit wound in the world. I breath, I silence, open up the wound with sticks, find a soft fugue and other still life, push it all through until there’s nothing but a hollow and an astrolabe in blaze. My father once told me that the thoughts of youth are slender, no, a misshapen hazard, no, they’re the disguise of prayer where we mean to make love, son, no, where we mean to make ourselves empty. No, the thoughts of youth are where we follow each other until we glisten with failure, no, they’re as sharp as the double-helixed concertina wire he buried deep in my mother, no, it’s the rope that pulled her tiny life into that muted dark. This mouthless thing, this unnoise where I daily bottle my father’s ashes and hang them from a tree for the magpies to trouble against; where I sit at the always-emptying edge of his bedside (such is the nature of remember), press my head against the shape of my mother as she stands above me, disrobed of life. I breast her with my hands. I kiss and kiss soft the new spaces in two red blooms.