What is pornography? What is dream?
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
forty years ago, four lifetimes ago,
brown as bourbon, warm, you said to me,
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
Then: “You’re killing your mother.”
And she: “You’re killing your father.”
What do men want? What do fathers want?
Why won’t they go to the mothers?
(What do the mothers want.)
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
your warm hand. Your glass. Your bedside table gun.
The dock, the water, the fragile, tough beach grass.
Your hand. I wouldn’t swim. I wouldn’t fly.
Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine is the author of nine books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, New & Collected Poems (Wesleyan, 2004). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America in 2000. She lives in New York City.
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