Tee up Da's brass Zippo. Pluck: no splash.
His golf balls will be bone comets
that coast out into nowhere.
Let shredded-brass rain
and dust fog cancel the towers
until town is a mesh grid:
all map and no place.
Then you will be a black shape
and your Da a ghost print on the grips.
Now: hug the golf bag to you.
Topple that body weight into the dark.
Don't swing in. Wait for no splash.
Hospital Years.
for S.R.1.
I was chalk on slate.
My life in ghost colors, shaped out
in that rain of statistics.
I watched trees' veins taper
through cobalt skies. Fine threads.
Their lung-pulse in the gusts.
Winds and snows pillowed in.
Rain drew in steel on glass:
brief nowhere tramways.
2.
I had ghosts behind me.
Paper robes would loom
and uncrumple when cast off.
My heat-print on steel tables.
My eyes locked on lit filaments.
They whirled like salamanders.
My veins were on the outside.
My nerves' fine threads caught static.
The lights. Doppler nausea. Hit like gusts.
3.
I dreamed of trees.
Cotton bud fists knuckled
up through miles of gravel.
Then black lightning
struck from underground.
All those packed skies burst.
I watched branches ruck tarmac,
unsocket cobbles, leave them heaped
like black eggs. I can walk these days.
Tim MacGabhann is a freelance journalist based in Mexico, with Vice, Ozy, and Foreign Policy. He also edits the literary magazine and press Mexico City Lit. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in Entropy, gorse, 3am, and The Stinging Fly.
@TimMacGabhann
