“He was the good son.”
Dad left to Dayton, maybe,
god knows where.
So, he carved a space for great men–
faces, shoulders broad with history,
tattered cloth flowing, fecund,
to make room.

“Chasing Skirts, that’s what we did,”
that’s what we did.

Brothers, sons, lovers,
a daughter. There is power
in weight, force in presence.
A story enough to build a self–
for him and her,
alive, still among the boxwood.

Top speed to Stanford,
and back east when it was time
to press eager thumbs for contour,
painterly metal on a pedestal

among the boxwood. So, it stands.
Then he left, too, and the smell
of sea-foam bronze boils back,
brings her back
to summers in Fort Greene, Barbados,
maybe now Santa Fe
where sweat and sprawl
recalls wounds and pain crawls into
the newness of town like patchwork lava.