What It Is To Be a Man

I remember the first fight
my brother John had with my father--
The sun and moon were
trading places against a burning
Autumn sky in Danvers, Minnesota,
and the kitchen air was so thick
with garlic and slate-grey smoke
that I felt I could never
fully rinse myself of it.
Too much noise, loud static,
then just bodies. Men.
So beautiful and ridged
they looked like lightning dancers
praising gods I'd never heard of.

The day Father brought John home,
he was a musk oxen carrying a
milk body still warm from the womb,
wrapped in an unmistakable blue blanket-- a boy.
Father dreamt of cheers echoing
in the football stadium at Glenwood High,
and sucking freshly cut Cohibas
on front porches stained with
Birchwood and tobacco.
He pictured them in fifteen years
inhaling the fumes--
and he tells the story of the first time
he ever fucked a woman.

The palm of John's hand
knows where it's going--
winds a path from the soul
of a foot around to curve
an aching inner thigh,
then up to graze the peach-skin belly
of a man.
It lingers there for a moment
and John's hand mimics
the steady rise and fall--
like the breath of the Earth.
And he knows he has never
felt more alive.
Somewhere under the same sky
Father sits on a thousand fading front porches--
Hard. Silent. Strong as an ox.