Your Father Knew Many Women And they flourished, his apricot grove. Glowing after dark, they webbed together in soft gossips. They were themselves hungry. You'll call them lonely, or sad, but you can't say which you hoped to be true. The summer you turned 12, you thought of little else, but how he was an excellent farmer. Apricots will take whatever they can get if they are truly hungry enough. You said you understood the situation. There is nothing like a man with slender hands.

You visited them to ask what he was like, to check them for scrapes from the large borer bug. You carried a salve at all times. On the bus, an old woman cradles something in a brown paper bag. You wait for the briny scream of fish or the glow of an egg tart, but all she is holding is her own hand. Letter to My Grandfather in April I have you to thank for these inheritances: a chopped plum still bleeding; dark pipe tobacco leaking from its box, strung cowrie shells glistening like virgins. Papa, your hands are now my father's hands, your bruisebelt is his own. We are running through the wheat off 78, two generations of quiet sucking each other's pain as you might a snakebite. My father has thrown his funeral jacket over the car antenna and it waits there like an accident.

We pretend to miss its darkness. We tear apart the wheat, cry like new mothers.