Father’s Day

Since my youngest son moved to another town, all my dowsing tip finds
is salty water. It happens like that, in the middle years a father sleeps,

resigned because he can see the Sunday when he wants to swim off
the island. And that makes the father sand because even if he breathes

nothing without scent of ocotillo, dry storms still wear thorns down.
He starts packing boxes full of bird-bone pendants and abalone dishes.

Red ochre, glass fragments. A never-used harpoon tip. Soapstone
ornaments and sandstone abraders. Subsists on raw shell fish and fat

of whale, his fondness for new potatoes, vegetables and fresh fruit waning.
The father begins to dress in skins and feathers of sea scoters he stitches

together with sinews of seal, using bone needles that arrive in mail
without a Father’s Day card. Stops speaking any known language.

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