Once I saw my dad as a great ape

Once I saw my dad as a great ape,
a hairy sullen silverback gorilla
who spoke in grunts behind the daily news;
not an unkind mammal, really,

but one preoccupied with his cages.
While I myself, a lithe pocket Tarzan,
groomed the furniture for pennies and dimes,
roamed the savage bedrooms, and kept a low

jungle profile down among the chairs.
Now when I see the eyes of apes in zoos
I see the human looking back, just as
once I saw the animal eyes above a paper.

And if I chance to think of my father,
I beat my chest with my hand, and I yell.

Solitude

Solitude

When I was nine
I learned to be alone
by walking in the woods
behind our house.

Solitude was preferable
to the tricky silences
that boobytrapped our home—
better to walk in the vast
Kabab National Forest,
that other house. 

One summer I climbed
high in a serious pine tree,
climbed until I could see
blue snow gracing the tops
of the far away San Francisco Peaks.

The ground below felt distant as the sky.
I was introduced to absence:
treetop to ground, ground to Peaks,
Peaks to home, home to here.

Absence is as vast
as a national forest
and more varied.

The smell of pine sap
stayed on my hands
long after I climbed down,
long after we left that house,

and long after I stopped smelling it.

On the Interpretation of Occult Cuisines

On The Interpretation of Occult Cuisines.

One day my dad asked for help at the college
where he cooked in the kitchen of privilege.
Angry and confused at this unwelcome
invitation into his working life,

I sat beside the ovens without speaking
until lunch, when he insisted
I help carry trays to the dining hall—
but then made me wait while his boss

told the students they were lucky
to have such a fine chef in residence,
and invited them to applaud the father
standing silently by me.

While they obliged I stood
with eyes down, embarrassed
at this adulation for a man
known to no one there.

We never spoke of it afterwards,
but years later I saw that the meal
had been cooked for a single,
hungry, obdurate student.

There's always a wasp

There’s always a wasp in the room when I paint,
single, singular, muttering, dissatisfied,
just out of reach above me.

I know it at once
if it touches my hair
with its stinger held bent
—flies are quicker, bees more direct.

I watch it circle the light.
It always surprises,
always terrifies,
always pleases me.

I kill it when I can
but a little danger in the air
is welcome when the palette dries
and the brush clogs.

Art is a blood sport.