The wind passes by
my father’s skin, leaving
not a bruise but a memory.
Yes, I admit: I am practicing grief.
My father has died
twice now by my count.
I am practicing death,
like a Buddhist monk bowing
a hundred and eight times,
knees touching the floor.
This is devotion:
rising, falling, rising, and falling again.
The first death, I opened
the apartment door to his body
bleeding atop a stone altar.
A strange orange glinting
on the cliffs of the stone
under the rising sun.
The second, at the beginning and end
of seven years in orange:
The metal bars shape him
and he shapes them in turn,
like wind to a bird:
White streaks of nothing.
It haunts me.
What do you want? I ask
to no answer.
Mark him in your sensation,
the rough fabric, Orange—
Take my father again now.