Cape Cod. 1960. Peking. 1997

Over there! There’s a fat man
striding across the beach, beer
in hand, chasing
his photographic negative,
wanting to buy up the property.
In front, addled images,
me and myself, digging with fury
into the white hot sand. Father,
you could never slow down.
Even in the sliced surface of this photo
of heaving tides and out-of-sight skies
I can hear your voice
flirting with neighbors, phoning sitters
as your scotch-soaked pals
from New York grimace and giggle.
Your illegible notes home made it clear
we needed scorecards, maps,
decoding rings just to find out
which end was up. Taxis
sped you away as you screamed
about important business meetings.
Miami? Las Vegas? Canton, Ohio?

We tried cement in your Florsheims
but ultimately feared martyrdom;
the headlines would blame us:
HANDSOME MAN, LIPSTICK, RIVER.
Saltpeter on Wheaties was easier
but as with Mithridates you got stronger,
pumping pints of coffee into your cancerous
organs. You were our candy,
our canoe up the Cuyahoga, our glib
majordomo, so we took ads out
warning future broken families
about your pills and your fuck up
at Three Mile Island and the lies
and cover-ups as the press
learned to sleep perfect sleep.
We were the children wide awake,

obnoxious with our ludicrous prayers,
our catcher’s equipment and comics,
the TV on all night, watching
Welles’s “Macbeth” 2, 3, 20 times,
thinking by 5AM that that was you--
drunk, sweaty in your armor--
leaping through dark and fog
and over battlements, rescuing us.

Mother could never take pictures:
unsteady hands, failed reverence
for facsimiles and technology.
Jesus, there’s sand everywhere. And father,
you and your engineering soul,
like Horace at Philippi, said see
you later, and there was your exposed son,
idiot shoveller, on some shore,
grinning for other moronic white families, saying Hi There!
to flag-waving picnickers. I could never
complete a task. If I had, I would have dug
through the earth’s core, I’d be radioactive,
I’d be the Vice-President of China,
where my million tiny, yellow children
would stiffly salute me, hourly.