Father, in Drawer

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our  DNA. The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down. July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin. The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left Living may have been still at supper while he died. That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washing To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.