I get a call from a California number I don’t recognize;
Something’s wrong with his heart.
That night I dream I am an airplane flying over Okinawa,
My silver body cutting through the air like bullets through water,
The sunlight catching my wingtips, I whirr.
There are boys in my belly and my heart,
There are boys in my cockpit, my cerebellum;
We are all going to die.
Pulmonary Ablation sounds like prayers and lemonade to me, but
Dad says I’ve got the heart of a poet, or something.
He’s got the heart of a dying person.
Grist for your mill, he says every single time, and,
Hemingway went to war so he’d have something to write about.
Then I am a sheet-metal lean-to,
Holding him in all of his sweat and ammunition,
A warped, corrugated chalice for his adolescence.
The heady smell of pot is riper in the jungle,
The looks between boys are more intense.
– Hey, Giamatti, you know what sound a helicopter makes?
– Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop…
I can keep it together long enough to hang up the phone—
And then the old forest floods;
Monsters and shadows emerge from the trees,
Men with hideous knives, with terrible guns,
Cancer gnaws at the floor where
The breadcrumbs have been eaten,
The compass spins infinitum upon its axis.
The boys from the bunkers shiver in their living rooms
Once they get back to the States.
Many die intentionally.
There’s something that seems to me now
Unbelievable, what I never asked him—
Did you cry, ever, like a child?
Father, did you ever break down?
