
remember when you fixed
upon the rust world of Mars
through your boyhood window,
did you ever visualize
your fatherhood frame
would stand over
those north pole water molecules
that sit restrained
beneath the bewitching surface?
You must know: water
thirty-five million miles away
cannot hold the same heft of home
as when you drink a tall glass
at the kitchen table
across from your son’s preschool smile.
Open the front door. Mars
beams red in a blacktop darkness.
Once that rocket slices through the sky,
your son will learn
to say your name as a curse
while your ex sleeps
in the black hole of her mattress.
Three light-minutes away,
your Kansas lung sacs
will sweep in buttressed oxygen
over oxidized soil. Soil
a twin shade
of your father’s rust-worn truck
engineless in your garage
a decade after his death.