I can’t look at the sky’s orange light over the color of ashes now 
without weeping. The fiery sparks among snow showers aren’t an asymmetry
of traveling souls. The lioness sun 

drops. My father sees out of a dead man’s cornea. Drops an army of golden
doves. The loveliness of a gladiola as it withers.

My uncle cast a branch through my father’s eye, an accident playing soldiers 
before they shipped off to Vietnam after Christmas, plane whirring
in a blue splendor. We almost didn’t go

to the beach that summer, sky full of unrest. 
Our last day, a freak lightning storm killed a teenage lifeguard waving 
everyone off the beach. Garlands of flowers 

at the bottom of her chair, the only visible sign. Her body’s ghost song, if you
could hear it, among terns’ crying. We return here in a blurring 

haze, my daughter pointing at translucent horses
in the waves, sky tinged yellow—the beauty of shadowing, as my father thins 
& grows older in winter light, reflecting inside mother-of-pearl 
shells, twilight in his one eye.
                        

My grandmother’s phantom city whitewashed by a heartsick sea. Maybe 
there was no water, but I heard its gushing heave when she storied the Old World, 
a psalm out of time. Stone

houses, corn poppies & baby’s breath, the heavy scent of beef & cabbage
outside. The Lord’s hand on it all. I try on surrender & specter. Shouldn’t prayer carry 
the weight of meeting God for the first, real time—

the way snow returns & I walk into his face? 

My daughter fills every silence with humming, where I hear peasant songs among
chaffinches, old women in checkered dresses still making duck’s blood soup.
The ground frozen in Advent. Her steps sounding on the stairs.
 
My grandmother’s body stout as a houseboat, illuminated by candles my mother 
lights at the side altar for her safe passage—through the needle’s eye—

even as evening fades, as the gardener puts away his shovel, as our tea cools.