I Look Through Myself Like a Window

I Look Through Myself Like a Window

down make-believe dunes,
black worms of seaweed strangled and strewn
on the bank, curling up dead between my toes
all muddy with tiny shells and moist sand.

What home is this? my father says, invisible
and loud from behind. I am trying to understand
why I live beneath the sun stretching out of bed
to burn my skin – in ferocious light.

Don’t ask me to know my body
in any other light than ferocious light.
I can’t recognize myself without it. I’ve tried –
when I’m down the dune and see no shadow
to dissect, to mine through bare-handed piece by piece

for what will fall out of me –
It’s that emptiness that gets me, he spits,
grabbing my shoulder with one hand, pointing into the vastness
with the other, folds of skin in his fingers, folds of sea,
both unsure, barely there like lines on bone.

My father never shows his face in this place,
just his hands, thick and strong and mysterious,
but people believe them.

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