Aphorisms for My Father

A waiting woman starves

until she avenges her patience.

Scars race wrack to nourish ruin.

The sure star secures its own erasures.

Paralysis is an epistle, morphine is a maze.

Cheerful only filches when it cheats suffering.

Promise me this: there’s more to a kiss

than a solvent for insults.

Promise me that: there’s less to a fact

than a scrim for rebuttal.

Promise me, then, father to son,

we’ll be neither fulcrum nor careful.