Echolocation
I begin with near-silence,
the droning refrigerator,
a dog barking far off.
You’ve just fallen asleep
as morning splinters
through the blinds.
He kicks off his boots,
braces himself on the dresser,
pulls at the leg of his jeans.
Something wakes you—
a knocked over jar of change,
a picture frame falling flat.
You must miss the feeling
of waking in the night
knowing exactly where
you are, hearing only
your brothers’ muffled voices
through the wall. Years later,
nights when my friends and I
stay up until dawn,
you’ll wake this way again
to laughter resonating
down the hall. One night,
to meet our girlfriends,
J. T. and I will sneak
to Arroyo Vista Park.
You’ll wedge a drumstick
in the window-track and wait
for our knock at the door.
After sending J. T. home,
you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know
somethin’ aint right. Because
this all feels close enough
to the truth, and because I have
no evidence I was made
the usual way—not even a picture
of you and my father together—
I’ve made this:
In splinters of
morning, you pull me from
his open mouth while he sleeps,
piece me together from handfuls
of his running breath, the small
sound of whitewater.
Proof
The fact is I was made
from what Whitman called
“father-stuff,” from a current
of you and from being held.
This—the raw physiology of it—
may explain why most fathers
think only of pushing their sons
into the world and most mothers
only of keeping them from it.
But the facts only tell us
half of every story, and never
the half we need. I have
a photograph taken just weeks
after I was born. I was
sleeping on your bare chest.
You were slouched in an armchair
with your fingers laced like rivulets
under my feet. These are facts—
even if you forgot, and even if all
I remember from being with you
before Arizona is the smell of
shop grease and dipping tobacco,
you once held me the way
a riverbed wants to hold a river.