Parents

Old two-hearted sadness, old blight

in the bones, the history of sugar

and the daily syringe, show tunes,

Shalimar, car after car after car.

Here are my names, all three

trochees ratcheted out like comeuppance,

here my oldest living forebear,

the Depression, my nose, my love for jazz.

Let us locate our first marriages

festering in the cedar closet.

You show me proximity, I’ll show you

the blank expansiveness of the West.

O roads, varicose and meandering,

bloody Kansas after Kansas between us—

there are days I’d kneel to kiss

the knuckles most like my own, other days

when a blue Pacific sun show me all

that’s possible, whole oceans of air

I can dream myself a kind of prince in,

a kind of bird, who believes he reigns there.