Watering this small plant
covered with road dust, half dead in tire tracks
and gasoline fumes, I forgot to tell you about
what is here and elsewhere,
How as a child driving in the car at night
I would lean into the immensity of my father
And feel suddenly safe, fear falling from me
Like water, and I would remember the overgrown
Thicket behind our house near where my ma hung out the laundry
And where sometimes I would go to feel something,
Anything in the scattering sky, wondering
why I was forever being born
How way past older now
Rebounding from the usual flinty remarks
I wished for before, emerging in the unseasonable
heat, looping up and doubling down and across the arbitrary
Freeway , I come across these blazing sparks of memory:
Arc flung up against the baffling sky