He crooks my head
toward his lungs slowing
in the morphine
bed and then I’m there,
at black of skull,
in the rhododendron
blooms where my dad
is still pulling rope
to cobble the trunk split
down the crotch by August
lightning, shattering pink
flurries onto the steam
of hemlock. On my back,
in the mulch, among my
tanks and soldiers, I squint
through flowered arms
to catch the leaking light
of day and watch him
sweat and spit and try
to tie off the wound.
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