Sculpture Garden

1.

I won't speak for everyone. But my father, not
sleeping for six weeks, turns
into the crumbling Czar-on-horseback
statue in the central square of his birthplace.
He just stands there, life-like.
Didn't he listen? He wasn't supposed to look

back while escaping. Everyone died.
The bodies spread around the statue like linked cobblestones.
They died. He didn't. It wasn't his fault.
Why am I looking at him like this?

2.

This is the house my father tried to build.
That patch of dirt raked
in geometric planes is a Japanese garden.
Those gaps the pigeons roost in are French windows.
A step-ladder-a spiral staircase-a helix. My father hasn't

slept in six weeks. There is a crack in the living
room wall. There is an icy roof.
He is watching the plaster.
Certain the house will collapse.
Should I talk to him when he doesn't talk back?
His tongue coated white.
Should I touch him? He is dirty.

3.

I can't help it.
When I think of that house I think of
the wreckers taking it down in ten minutes.
Neighbors carrying off faucets and two-by-fours.
My mother in drugged sleep with a ten-syllable disease.
A galoping disease.
My father next to her, his cracked lips the only moving thing
in sight.

4.

What did they find with their shovels,
the Americans?
Was the thing stacked very high? Was the thing
visible froma single angle?
Did they have to walk around it,
the thing?

5.

Hold still, my father says. The shutter clicks
And again. My mother and I blink.
Pose after pose around the sickbed. White spots.
Once in a dream I made love to my mother.
It did no good.

6.

I sit in my room hands blackened with newsprint.
Why not believe the papers.
Things turning wrong.
Gets in the dirt gets in the water.

7.

Gets in the dirt gets in the water.