At a red hot light
At a red hot light
a bang like a shrill vacuum
stampeded my father who
ceremonially
looked up through the blue in his windshield
at the small-town sky in anticipation for
death from above.
Instead a crying girl
apologized for the bumper
unaware
she drove the black carriage
that transplanted him back
to his mostly suppressed youth in a
monastery in Lebanon
where he’d buried the dead between bombings
because the other boys were too afraid of ghosts.