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1
- Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an
- amber black look, like my father
- about to pass out from disgust, and I remember
- she was born under the sign of Saturn,
- the father who ate his children. Sometimes
- the dark, silent back of her head
- reminds me of him unconscious on the couch
-
2
- every night, his face turned away.
- Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother
- with that coldness that passed for reason in him,
- that anger hardened by will, and when she rages
- into her room, and slams the door,
- I can see his vast blank back
- when he passed out to get away from us
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3
- and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,
- to coal. Sometimes I see that coal
- ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,
- trying to persuade her toward the human, her little
- clear face tilts as if she can
- not hear me, as if she were listening
- to the blood in her own ear, instead,
- her grandfather's voice.
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