My father sends me a text
from halfway around this watery, sliding
piece of space rubble we inhabit.

I think, how amazing that my very father
is walking amongst tribes I can only imagine!
eyes falling upon children and huts and sere
red earth, and for a few weeks
it will be all he talks about, thinks about,
pours his considerable passions over

And then one day, he will wake up
in Moscow, or Istanbul, or beside
some graduate student with a sharp pelvis,
taut thighs free of varicose veins.
those children, his walks, the stinging
dry dirt in his face will suddenly
become something of a different life,

their visceral immediacy saturated,
borne under time’s wet cascade.

But, for a morning, he is texting
me, his eldest son, his lingual heir,
from Kenya, walking amongst
our distant ancestors, pitying them
as only a suburbanite can: with such
good intention and such hopeless inaction.

He, like me, is stilted by his unique
existence in such a vast, incomprehensible
muddle, a world that allows humanity
to send computers into orbit, to use this
giant orb’s own gravity against itself
so that a father and son, half a world apart,
can share a few insignificant words

~ ~ ~

The comings and goings of memory,
of intimacy and need, are no different
here than in Kenya, or in Madrid
or even someplace as unusual as Taipei.

We stumble on a rock, and remember
as a child holding hands with a girl
wearing roses around her frail, equine neck,
kicking pebbles along the asphalt, smelling
of fetid earth and bodily expulsions.

How lonely it is that we must bear
such minor losses alone because there is no
collective well of sorrow for them.
We ourselves are deep but narrow, and slick,
so once fallen, the past cannot
scratch its way back to the present's
as-yet-unseen cobbling of atoms

Let this then be our communal condolences
for the seconds of regret and longing;
their absence, mine and yours, is nil,
like a folded particle of air escaping fire

~ ~ ~

To my little sister, so ready to love,
so cautious because you have seen our brother
rage and roil, watched him submerge:
It is possible to love a person, man
or woman or child, for but a few
gracious beats.

This brief rapture carries the same
truth as marriage, the same bountiful
humanity. We seek one another so
desperately. We are rapacious marauders
scavenging the savanna at night for scraps,
esurient refugees holding tight
to our last morsel.

A glance held, rolled over
like a piece of shimmering obsidian,
then broken, may not be regained.
It is possible to love for the slightest
fragment of existence, and then to
never love again.