DISTANCE

What rises through me
could be breath or wind;
I shiver with the thrust of it.
Past my window, the stricken
corridors of Brooklyn, to the grey,
pulsing mesh of the screen porch
where my father steps out
and lets the dark air take him.

I can’t imagine what he hears,
swirling his cheap martini
to the stark clutter of leaves;
The way he could listen to thunder storms by himself in the summer
and I knew not to go near him.

The trees set off their soft,
urgent twinings,
the grass rises like the knives
of saints to greet him.

He already can't find his way back.

My mother snores on the couch, the gardens in her magazines
folded across her lap,
the garbled blue flower of TV
plays for no one in the kitchen.

Across the screen,
someone in a white shirt
wanders on a beach.