TWO POEMS by W. Todd Kaneko
ELEGY WITH SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
Home is our name for the long dead
workshop where we keep memory alive
by fashioning new animals to stalk
the back yard. This is a two-headed cow
standing near the shed, eating everything
we thought holy. This is an ancient tiger,
sabre-toothed and wicked, his spiky tail
wrecking the patio. My dead father walks
around my house at night, fixing things
that don’t need fixing and breaking
everything he touches. This morning
the cupboard doors were unhinged,
all the kitchen lightbulbs burned out.
I blindfolded my father and drove him
to the forest’s edge and left him in a field
of wildflowers and when I got home,
he was already back—he had dismantled
the front steps and used the pieces to build
a shrine to the sky. We kneeled,
me and him and all the weird animals
we have wrought together, and we prayed
we might figure out how to remind the dead
they are dead, how to differentiate
where we live and where we are buried.
DINOSAUR THEORY
Imagine that one day I will be dying
and my son will want to talk
about dinosaurs, those terrible lizards
dessicated and deposited in the shale,
long shadows of the herd abandoned
to stone. He won’t believe the asteroid
theory because a collision between Heaven
and Earth makes too much sense
when it comes to theories about death.
Imagine T. rex watching the sky turn black,
little arms held up in vain to shield her face
from the fire and filth—she could be
curled up with her brood in a cave instead,
babies tucked between haunch and tail
for the end of days. Death awaits everyone
one day, but imagine if it didn’t—
my son and me sitting on the front porch,
beards down to our knees and looking
for something to talk about with my father.
He lifts both of us in his arms and we look up
at the sky, at birds in search of warmer weather,
at the stars beyond because old habits
are hard to break. We listen to the ruckus
in the distance—ambulances and police cars
all blasting their sirens and horns along
with the dinosaurs’ horrible song.
