Remaining Unmarried
At the stop sign my mother squints at a statue
I picked out from SkyMall. Somewhere,
a truck crashes into a tree, unleashing ravens,
and it's Apollo and Daphne, holding on.
She married young, to my father in a church
outside a small town of trucks.
Her mother ordered a statue of ice--
not quite Bernini, as it seems.
It shipped on a truck, bedded in hay
and something red, though it wasn't important
to my father, who just wanted to build mild winters.
not quite Bernini, as it seems.
It shipped on a truck, bedded in hay
and something red, though it wasn't important
to my father, who just wanted to build mild winters.
Apollo could only watch, as Daphne treed.
My grandmother told my father to button up his pants
and sit on a throne of ice because he was not yet a king.
He spoke in tones that bled words with -ing's, and when
tomorrow rode in on that truck, morphing asphalt to water,
a laurel whispers to my father, not Zeus.
Someone stood up, and with a gunshot of branches,
the beds of fledgling truckers laid to rest in the bottom
of something that never knows decay.
Like Eros, gold glistens darker than the summer, dipped
in something trucked in on a Tuesday, from the underbelly
we only see through the eyes of a raven. It's almost yelping
to be understood, our desire for a fathering.
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