Even as a crawling baby
I imitated you, my father,
with a matchstick in my lips
for your Capstan cigarette
I lighted with a thumb flick.
Benign as a cloud you drifted
in and out of my young life
and died when I was fifteen --
flattened on a narrow floor.
I returned from a teen night
to be hurled inside a misty
mass I’ve tried to grasp for
forty long years. Perched on my
window ledge, it still chokes the air
and melts on me when I sleep.
The mist is lifting slowly. I see
my walled-in head as a hollow
of rocks, moss, and dripping water
with a roof of jagged stone chips;
no people in it, no body.
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