Heavenly Father

His first father lived in Iceland,
gutting sheep until their throats blew
out like bubblegum or froze black 
in the six-month winter. One March
his childish arms were stripped of bone 
and Father taught him how to hold 
your wrists still like fishing lines 
as an opened lung presses back 

against the knife, nothing left to steal
from them except their name or the stink
of liver. The hide had cooled tough 
and the pink mouth spilled in tongues but
the boy's wrists stayed. Slabbed in a chair 
ten years later he watched his Father 
shit himself and talk about the lion, 
the great golden lion he had seen.

His second Father was a girl
from Cornwall who collected shells 
for a missionary in St. Ives.
She forced him over the altar
one night with vodka and dog-scents
lashed to her neck - slick muscles
gulped and held together until, 
like a jumping fish leaping gold

and green in the sun, he felt black
sugar exploding through him, snapped
like a cheap ruler as confetti drifts 
white and timeless through each room 
of his house. Ten seconds can crush
the words like a fast truck riding 
on the bridge of your throat, but fifty 
years together is just coincidence.

His final father came one night
when an artery that had slept 
inside his brain burst misfired
into ambulance disco lights 
and a crimson mess on the kitchen
floor. In Haiti a phone sings like 
Orpheus in the maple trees 
and he wraps his hand around it,

his hand, his fingers, his muscles
pulling it up and he knows - fake wombs
lie and walk like thieves, we fall for them.
Sunsets lie, children lie, 
even breasts and young women lie. 
Only our one Heavenly Father 
tells the truth - we need death, he says, 
and the desperate final screams of the sheep.