A Dream Where My Father Walks on Water, After He Decided to Burn His Childhood Photos

He entered my nights. Like a falcon, a steed, sure of himself, but also softly, a dove landing on balsam. Oscillations of grief. There are oranges, sunflowers, men returning from the sea, loves gone into the ground. Shouldn’t prayer show me I’m alone in the world & not alone enough? He turns to a luminous school of fish in the Seine. The water is light. The future, the color of tea. In Vietnam, a junkyard rat bit his arm. Elvis still playing on the radio. At the top of a mountain in Saigon, under bone stars, he wished for cherries, the scent of wet bark. He draws graffiti behind my eyes. Orange orchard. Travel light. Sarcophagus. Unshrouds his body to show me his operation scars. The cornea from a dead man. He wanted to be a carp to outswim his future. He knew he’d never see his home again. His face is my face. He wanted to be the gray tornado he watched rupturing houses on the next street, rather than go inside for another beating. He still dreams of Vietnam. Now I dream of war, but without sound. But smoke in my father’s hands. The lunar eclipse. I dream of the soldier threatening to kill him with a 12-inch knife. But that night the soldier died from a lightning strike, his body crumpled on the knife on a hill. My father says if he was killed, I wouldn’t have been born. God’s country drowns in my father. My father shows me the place his feeding tube went in, the shallow under his ribs.