Fault Line

There’s an animal we’re all trying to become. Beak to tail, talon to talon.
Each night before bed, my mother prays to her mother, now a small god,
now the weepcloud rain ripening the scent of someone’s orchard.
She once sighed & said I’ve inherited my father’s hands. The same jitter,
the violet dunes of vein. The rest of him is sand I can’t gather into anything.
Each dawn, light spills its milk on the sky’s dark bedsheet. Warblers snap
their songs open in the air. Closer than ever to my own animal, I leave
the bed to give my hands meaning. I carve an altar with sandstone
& sun, give him boots overgrown with grass, hair to nest a family of pigeons.
The candour of his smile becomes my only proper noun. I shape his voice
after the softening of a storm. I fill his pockets with tomato seeds. Someday,
I’ll trace my fingers on whatever grows on the scorched earth of his leaving.