my father loved me like a sacrifice so I have loved 
like a distant cloud, or emerging sun, like a fox with its tail on fire I’ve run from the towns and burned down the fields that would feed me. Once when I thought of innocence I drew a picture of myself as I was before my father named me for his wife. Small and white 
on a background blue as his sheets with their military creases. The pillows were distant clouds unlike my mother’s hair unlike her teeth, those porcelain bells, his fist making the clapper swing. 
 And how do the clouds ring 
the tops of the mountains like that silent in their chime, filled 
from beneath with fire.