The Weathers
1.
To us children,
the small hotel garden
was filled with effects,
but not causes.
Overhead, petals falling, or
leaves spaced perfectly—
if we bury a coconut,
it will turn into a tree.
So when our family vacation
ended, we reasoned:
if we bury our key
in the hotel’s small garden,
then our family will return
again and again—
so we buried our keys,
not knowing we had wills,
and pressed our selves
to the exhibition glass.
When we bring our father to prison,
guards go through his things.
Some, they reject. Others,
a handful of items,
will be his personal effects
for years—
what is prison but a Cause.
As we watch our father fumble through
a pair of glasses and black sneakers,
which the guard rejects,
we know we have wills.
We are adults now.
We don’t bury our keys.
But we bury our keys.
We know we have wills.
2.
They take you
from the parking lot
to the visiting room:
shoeprints do,
painted to the ground.
They gaslight you: as if,
in prison, we are free to follow,
or not follow, the correct path—
we pass buildings which are unmarked.
The walls hold prisoners.
We must be passing, even now,
stick insects, sea horses,
stealthy owls,
the camouflaged animals.
From the shoeprint path, we are not
to make eye contact.
Only the guards are permitted to Sight them.
But we look.
We see a moth,
maybe our father.
3.
Diderot said the blind
carry through time
their first touches:
when the sightless
Mathematician felt
his lover’s face
for the thousandth time
it was the first time.
He remembered the feel
as though it were made of clay.
“The more pleasure he would have
in this memory,” Diderot writes,
“the less regret he would have”—
the Mathematician taught himself
to read, feeling tombstones
with his fingers.
They must have signified life to him—
our father is not blind.
Prison is a graveyard.
Their faces age.
Our father was a non-native
in an adult world, like we were
still making our home in it.
He is a native now.
He points to planes on their
diurnal path
over prison. He points to each.
He says, that is Air France, that is Alitalia.
4.
We find our father
so far inside, that on visiting
days, we are tiny suns sharpening
on the horizon. He has gone
to meet the fear
that he will die in prison.
When we visit, the long unspeakable
shadows lengthen even more—there is
no atmosphere on that rock, no air,
only black space
at his fingertips: he sees
the truth plain, the true day:
he says the future is before his eyes.
So we bring him
the weathers,
shape-shifting beings
who stand between the days
who leave as quickly as they come.
The weathers, we keep
in our minds, which can’t be checked.
(Only quarters and id cards permitted,
in plastic bags.)
Today we have brought one
we know from the beach:
cooling sand—the hour,
when the day’s activities are cast
into memory.
The ceremony of the kiss
is a staid passage
after which he’ll see
the eyes of the day.
5.
The cards portray the back
of our father’s head,
not his face.
He is the last to read the tome
which turns through him, and faces
away. He has bolts
in his knees,
blades in his shoulders,
brains in his head,
lies in his soul, which they
pulled like teeth.
Our father sleeps on his lie, on the tooth,
exposed, no mattress, no pillow: the bed is
cold and metal, like the surface of cold
water which wrings a person
and carries detritus away from its source.
The inmates’ teeth jangle
on the guard’s hips
and tonight we have stolen
one of the keys.
We have brought Nature
to mother the prisoners
whose bodies take up space.
To break through the walls
with roots as through stigma.
No longer will they be forced to
live in a place
that won’t have them—she’ll
overgrow this temple
with a thousand hollows. Leaves
flutter like hands
ushering us to go in—
tonight we are an animal family.
We have brought materials for
our costumes. For our father, we lay
a sheet over him and cut
around his body.
We trace and cut the other half.
When guards come through for four am check,
we are already asleep in our hollow.
6.
My son came into the world
a sealed, clean envelope.
They weighed him on my chest.
Wind whipped though his cords.
His eyes peeled like slivers of abandon.
I am the postwoman of this envelope.
I must protect the original message.
Everyone sanitizes their seats
with Clorox wipes and Purells like bees.
The prison will close to visitors soon,
we hope and fear—
our father has all the underlying conditions.
This is the treacherous pass
which could harm them both.
I hold the envelope close.
Everyone contains the same original message.
My baby tugs on my father’s face.
7.
We stored our father
in the past tense
where he could be found again:
life before prison.
That is where we waited for him,
at the stolid lip of the earth.
But the Netherworld present
has suddenly grown urgent.
The air there is toxic,
prisoners are dying—
we open the epic.
Our father is alive:
he is deprived of light,
soil is his sustenance
and clay his food,
he is clad like birds are with feathers,
he is worn again, but by choice,
like the shirt we were held to as children—
the warden moves in
like a crack in the cuneiform.
This would happen: calls interrupted
by warnings, emails read.
They detain them
while a virus lays claim to their quarters—
in this, our father is a friend made for Gilgamesh
whose death is a lacuna:
he would have continued his trembling vision.
He would have died.