Daddy, who is to say you have flown too far You can’t be seen any more behind the moon’s extravaganza You are somewhere they haven’t named yet but I think it does have a name, maybe dark sky mountain, the one you started climbing when you rose from the room and your body became wrinkles and weighed less by the heft of your soul And all of us felt your breath going away Even the name-tagged nurses in their doubting suits knew there was no point in turning you in bed any more because you were the same on the other side When I was a child I left churches forever because I decided they might blow down and besides, I didn’t trust their priests, who couldn’t tell me what was true but knew only to talk and talk as if the heat out of their mouths would brand belief on my skin like so many roses I think you’re past the tree line on that mountain by now Daddy, and onto the balding ground which is more beautiful than anything you could have told me before this moment, holding me on your lap on one of the rare evenings you were home Though you did used to sing: Blue Sky Day, early, when your chest hairs would glitter as if it had rained during the night And all those mornings on the way to school, I watched your lips in the rear view mirror and made mine the same And they came in their hundreds in the end — to mourn you, yes, but also to see if you might have left any of your tongue behind And when they saw you had, they folded the paper very small, and put it in the breast pockets of their suits I am holding to you now Daddy, writing those poems when you were younger than my son, and bent over your leather-bound book which asked only the highest of you, and I think of the pilot your friend, who fell in flames over Germany, and how gorgeously you sent him down.