Recollection has a strange virility, one stolen
from gravity, that angel whose OPEN sign
isn’t lit. Saturday leaks out of the radio, and I
am trying to hear what came ajar in my father
while he traced his sorcery across the operas.
I will prove that the translation of his spells
is impossible. That, overcoated, in his Lazarus
strut, he won’t be rehabilitated by new shoes.
Please, release me from pretending that you
never felt the dilation of his advance. My father’s
father had taken so many newspapers that our
quarrels grew bearded with grasshoppers. Spring
gallops through what it condenses, and no is
a very long time. The arbors my father’s father’s
father planted, those arbors aren’t. My perspiration
understands now how these lawns are English.