On Q Street, dehydrated, I walk into St. Thomas Aquinas church
to mollify my body from the summer heat. Dangling above a pulpit, Christ toils
on a crucifix. I loaf into a nearby pew, basking in air conditioning, a man
at the far end turns, as wood creaks against concrete. On stained glass windows,
wreathing their own music, Saints like serfs working on their lord’s estate,
perhaps psalms dropping from their mouths. When I visited Holmes Lake later
that evening, as my son chases after them, geese flap their wings into violet sky.
I close my eyes, and my deceased daughter is whispering her fragrance,
like dwarf daylilies boarded in a garden. A song is a dialogue between a soul
and its body. Above a harp holed in a bur oak, as fall, summer begins in leaves.
Lisp of wind holds the humid speech of weather. Home is hotter than this, I whisper. With no reproach, my body is a clamor of thirsts. I stream my throat with ice latte—
At this time of year, back home, my throat will be a silo for the grainy dust
of harmattan. Earlier, in another park by a fountain, water rushes out
of a pipe-mouth encircling the cascade. A coffle of worries like shadows follow me everywhere in this prairie, the memory of home hurries out as sighs. It’s exhausting
to hold home as a pendant. I wonder what thirst nostalgia can quench.
This is where I live now, away from the comfort of my blood. On my way
back from Starbucks, in a nearby quarry, a bird struggles to hold on to life, all alone,
rolling in bush as if trying to douse the ardor of pain stuck on its feathers,
a death-wound. I don’t know why it reminds me of my first day in America
when my wife observed cars parked close to sidewalks craving company
of people. Quiet and lonely, though it is not what dying feels like,
I imagine the bird, if it has a voice, will agree it is.
