Global Warming Releases the Family Ghost
My permafrost softens, releasing you, father, like a dormant
bacteria, unfrozen and hungry for all the living things
twenty years out of your reach. You sat at Christmas
dinner, you returned from the moon still loving us imperfectly.
Without boundaries, you will not stay dead. Don’t wait for us
on the outskirts of life, frozen like erratic sediment, held
together with turquoise and amber disappeared for millennia.
We cannot escape the universe’s chemistry. Kismet will bring
us back together. Have faith.
I hear your voice only in my dreams like an iceberg unfreezing
from time, melting into the future. I wake startled, afraid you need
more than I can give, afraid you portent famines of the past,
afraid I have not missed you rightly, that I fail loving
you whom love drowned.
spring immigration
birds migrate across
borders as though countries
do not exist
