Post Immigration Pastoral

Remember the one that you loved for?
Giving away all their secrets.

Coarse gray ash
on a coarse green field.

Our father skinning
a goat or pretending to.

Forgetting that love takes
change.

Sometimes I want to say no
I’m not finished. As a matter of fact fact

has no matter. Or truth.
Every dream is a little bit jealous

of dying. Every death
is a little relieved.

Remember the two gray trees?
Where the neighbor hung himself

in bundles of wire. And our father
was there to untether him.

For years I dreamt only
of hands. The trees stripped bare

like matchsticks. Coarse
dead body on a coarse live

body. Shouldering him
to the grass. If you could take away

the real things — the pollen sticking to our shirts,
the poplar too pretty to fit,

the lemons wanting
nothing of growing —

I wonder if our father would turn
to a dream. I wonder

who he loved for and left for. Those
widening figs in his hard polished

eyes. Do you remember
asking why he didn’t cry then? Do you

remember his steady hands?
How badly we wanted to love, in him,

some unliftable part of ourselves?
These days I ask questions badly.

These days I dream of
you moving away.

Love, I’m learning, is an act of mercy.
Love is an act

of sacrifice. Our father untangling
a jacket from a branch.