On the days she is not boro or back bay or northwest bend,
the hours she is the quiet New Jersey drought, she stays put,
near home, weaving ribbons. She is the lips of the Passaic, weaving through iron,
stone to lowland swamp, but words are not all she looms in that bustling city.

Find her in drainage ditches, in the wet tongues of Clifton's suburban curbsides,
near Spruce Street or Ward, floating down Pennington Park, a lined paper boat,
winding, climbing, navigating the dead to safety. I swear that if you lose her,
all you have to do is knock on leaning oaks, or smoke out of a cave.

Her words wings in the underworld that is the gut. If you look close,
it is love's fibers she threads, wide and emergent with all her strokes,
dancing in rooms reserved for slowness.

Kneel, go ahead, just kneel
to the ground, listen close to the Passaic passing by
on the errand of her heart.

                                     Smoke

Your father turns the rib-eye on the grill. In a few days he'll leave home
for field duty. You watch him get lost in the puff of new smoke.
It is like flipping a record over after the last song:

He slips his fingers on the vinyl, scratched and worn,
skating the dark circle. He does not know
his wife will thin the night and the linoleum
in a slow dance made for two.

In a weekend ritual, he bends over those old album covers:
Cash, Waylon, Campbell, their liquor red-eye and his.
Their superstar cowboy brims, your daddy’s boonie hat,
their throats cut with gold and diamonds,
around your father’s neck a noose dragging a dog-tag.

"… cow-boy, dun-dun", your father sings,
the chorus of fallen leaves crackling in the drainage ditch.
You wave away smoke to get a good look at him.
He smiles and you worry when he does it with all his teeth exposed.
It’s the kind of grin reserved for beer and barbecue and Sundays.

You try to sing along too to something rhinestone
but you get the words wrong. Your Papi lights up,
a tobacco puff blows your way, fragrant like cinnamon.
He does not look at you; instead, he looks around
at everything he’ll never own, though he signed for it.

Daughters and scraps of credit and memory. Children,
cornhusks blocking out his sky. Five mouths and a broken dial
on the pawn shop Sanyo. All he gets now is snow
in someone’s coal miner daughter.

Give him room, a cloud of smoke whispers, tells you to go away,
let your Papi do his thing. The smoke collars him, turns his hair white.
There’s a devil in the next track. You know what comes next.
He’s listening for clues, even in the scratches.

He is far gone, already turned to a secret B side, tuned to a twang
you cannot hear, blue forest floors in his eyes,
all the backcountry of his mind. The ditches he’ll dig,
holes he’ll slip into. You’ll always wonder

if all the voices that called were in his mother’s tongue
or if they carried all the dusts of Clarksville.

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