I dream my parents have a restaurant in a city
that is a mashup of Honolulu, where they lived,
and Venice, which they never even visited, and their bistro
is on a very Italian piazza or I guess I should say
campo because we’re in Venice or a dream Venice,
which you could say about the real city,
especially when summer ends, and I know what this dream
means because a few weeks before we were
riding home from dinner, and the other couple are talking
about their fathers, and they ask me, “What about
your dad?” and I say, “He was a loser,” and right away
I want to bite off my tongue, because in the eyes
of the world he didn’t do much, but he was the sweetest man,
loved poetry, bought the book that changed my life,
took me to the beach, taught me to swim, treated others
with kindness, was elegant, and looked good
in a suit, which is how he lured my mother, who loved him
until the end though he exasperated her
with his fecklessness, and if she had been sitting beside me
in that car, she would have said, I taught you
better than that, and she did, but I often fail to heed her
voice in my head, trust someone who is trolling
for a soft spot where they can stick in a knife, but love
can lead you astray, and in that dream restaurant
in Venice, my mother looks up from the books, and says,
“We got a great deal, because the former owners
lost their liquor license, and since we don’t drink, we don’t
serve alcohol,” and I look around at the miserable
diners, with their glasses of tap water and sodas, and think
I’d never eat here, but I did for the first eighteen
years of my life, and ate well, never missed what I didn’t
know, and my dad is the host at the restaurant,
looking sharp in an Italian blazer and an ascot, and he
turns to me with such a look of love on his face
and kisses me good-bye as I step into the gondola of sleep
which ferries me to my bed in the present moment,
that kiss still warm on my cheek like a greeting
from a land to which I, too, will be traveling soon.
