It weighs on me Dad
this outline of history
light at the base of the sky
and an image of solitude climbing the ledge
It weighs on me
that you don’t give
importance to the summer moon
or the forest’s pine-needled floor
A room away
my mother sleeps the curtains waver
The landscape is very peaceful
its purple mantle sinking
an entrance to elusive meaning
the lion the ox the eagle
the man That you do not
remember
the plants and flowers of the east
It weighs on me
Wind all night my mother sleeps
Her room wavers under my knees
Many men in the hills
bending under the weight of packs Dad
white at the mouth of the laurel
our most assured gestures our clearest ideas
the heart of
everything we thought
balanced on the middle of a bridge
I hold the edge
of the curtain in my mouth it tastes
of nightgown
Lambs wander
the remains of the wood
leafy crests of the acanthus cluster
and black parts below I too
was someone else
lamps turned off my mother
a room away
where earlier I lay at her feet
The men wait up
by turned-off lights Dad
mystical sky false entity
husband of the hillside sarcophagus
I too was overwhelmed
by innate
drunkenness and incurable
truth to pass
The rocks and the lambs
and fountains to the east I was merely
the gestures
rivers flowing down
to a bridge at the base of the house
where my mother’s eyelashes
trickle along as she sleeps
Bent below
the weight of packs
the face of the mountain
it weighs on me
the wrong remains the meaning ruffled
by light waves
I’ll be the ledge you be the lookout
Dad I will not
return for you
Michael Homolka’s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in publications such as Denver Quarterly, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, and Witness. He grew up in Los Angeles and works in book production in New York City.