1.
so admit it and be done with the admission
he believed and will believe forever now that all Jews live fleeing, blue fins of his prized ‘59 Chevy swimming through shadowed light, wheel grasped in his hand
after a fight, steering our driveway with the help of hydraulic power developed during World War II
my father weaves through redwoods that speak of accumulated rings
he is the sound of gravel popping under tires, the red glow of taillights momentarily braking before
he turns out of sight
and in my useless confession meant to locate him as sound akin to bullets ricocheting
nothing fades away, no frame closes, as at the end of an old movie, on the center of the screen like a circular shutter blinking to black
so he gets stuck, in time, an everyman and every city Jerusalem
red light absorbed into red bark
and if he is the admission, he is also the silence that comes before
and the echo that lasts in the ear like tinnitus, ringing out run, run, run
2.
they will gather around his diagnosis during shiva and knot their fringes tight and say that Alzheimer’s was a blessing in the end
but there is no end
and the encircled scene on the decorative plate that catches my eye later that day reminds me of my father’s rages
placed in my hand, a porcelain adornment he gave as apology, after
and they will chant their hymn and consolation for seven days
and the tiny flowers on the plate will stay in their budding state on the shelf and, therefore, there is no end
and, therefore, no end to becoming
for seven days, a meadow holding tight to its bloom like
words on a page in the kitchen sink of my first apartment, water turning ink to frilly petals, making of his hateful script some other thing that’s delicate
on the leaves of his letter I knew better than to read
3.
so admit how much I still have yet to learn of intuition, that flow of inner time, invisible homesickness
all Jews live fleeing and can never flee
if threat lives in some muscular state, so my father rummages in theories
of negative entropy, mesmerism, élan vital
hoping for curative aspects to come from magnetism accumulating inside an Orgone Box
the box stands in the corner of his therapy office, where two blue couches face each other, where he tries to look deep into the gaze of each of his patients
and stinging nettle perpetuates its green outside the window, leaves and stems covered in hypodermic hairs some scientists say can disrupt the body’s transmission of pain
inject histamine into a wound to override the original inflammation
and, therefore, I admit without the dread
of abandonment that has self-propagated and spread throughout my life, until it’s nothing but field after field
of stinging weeds I’m wading through with bare legs
that when I peeked into the porthole on the Orgone Box and saw my father sitting in its dark hollow, eyes closed to the light
something awoke, subconsciously, and I cradled it by constricting my lips as I turned away
and, therefore, he is shallow breath and rapid oxygen
he is a numbness and a buzzing inside my mouth
4.
like the ball of bees at his back as he stumbles through the rhododendrons
through those blooms with freckles in their throats to the barn and calls out for me
through me, yelling to go to the store for antihistamine, though I’m not licensed yet to drive, so he
drives me through the burning
through our stand of redwoods, and we make it up the hill and around the first bend before he feels the surge like a wave
that simply washes through him, there, in the driver’s seat, taking the body with no time
for the thought to pass through the mind that I am grasping
the wheel and swinging the car into a driveway and yanking the emergency brake
all is silent: the heavy engine under its hood, releasing heat from so much sudden revving
seems to sigh with the sound of grit inside the gears, like my father
breathing through his teeth, passed out in a pool of his own piss
his mouth lolling open, his tongue for once soft and passive, vulnerable
5.
the third and final admission is this: he didn’t die of bee stings nor drown in the sink with his blooming words
but he kept an EpiPen tucked in his breast pocket
and he kept on driving
and geneticists kept on debating the mechanism by which chemical markers express trauma
until I found myself running
running out of the conference room, running block after block at full tilt through the rebuilt streets of Warsaw
back to my hotel room to read again in private my sister’s text, saying our father was in hospice after all these years
of a battle that now might finally find its end
6.
what happens next feels like peering through the lens of a microscope to see the slip of a bit of something staged under the clip
memory, it turns out, is like that
I keep adjusting the knob, trying to bring into focus
a single cell unknit from its whole
but it never resembles an object to touch or to grasp or to hold in my hand
what happens
next is a stinging inside my lips, as if I’ve bitten down hard, sitting on the edge
of the hotel bed next to the window, wondering
how the roses that cover the drapes can be blooming
given that they have no stems
