Sometimes
my daughter looks at me with an
amber
black look, like my father
about
to pass out from disgust, and I remember
she
was born under the sign of Saturn,
the
father who ate his children. Sometimes
the
dark, silent back of her head
reminds
me of him unconscious on the couch
every
night, his face turned away.
Sometimes
I hear her talking to her brother
with
that coldness that passed for reason in him,
that
anger hardened by will, and when she rages
into
her room, and slams the door,
I
can see his vast blank back
when
he passed out to get away from us
and
lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,
to
coal. Sometimes I see that coal
ignite
in her eyes. As I talk to her,
trying
to persuade her toward the human, her little
clear
face tilts as if she can
not
hear me, as if she were listening
to
the blood in her own ear, instead,
her
grandfather’s voice.