Memorial Junction

I dreamt your father was
restoring James Dean’s Little Bastard,

the frame painstakingly
pieced and arranged, scarred metal
of molten impact unwound
and bound in Georgia.

He asks about you, your
military father, Command Sergeant Major. Truth is,
I know as much as his greying face, more aged now
than before when we skipped class at cedar shoals high
or when he found us in your black Ford under midnight.

You live on my eyelids,
reversed and stationary, your black robe
and black coffee sitting at our
table when we lived at  the little place on Morton St.,

your cigarette idling in the morning swell.

And it’s not like I can tell him
the truth, deviate away from
our own crash: you standing outside
the Trappeze Pub,  grasping at anything and

everything, the spitting snow, slosh and dirt- your
drunken decoration of finite:

how I, destruction,

could wrap you around metal, fragmented with longing,
left in the waning winter.