In the Name of the Tongue

Come Sunday afternoon and I sat back hunched
in the car, thumbing my father’s Bible, the door slamming

behind him, as though his gun had burst a nest of birds.
I fingered the grime into my hair and sat rehearsing,

Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house,

my father’s sweet-tongued weights turning coolly on my tongue
as I thought again of that verse in which the woman

wets Jesus’ feet with her tears and mops them away with her hair,
the lean long day sliding past, hot in the nest of my jaw.

It was always the same house we stopped at, Baba and I,
the one whose eaves hung low like the milkman’s sly eyes

when they followed Florence Wida’s behind
and made him clang his bell more slowly.

Afterward Mami’s anger rose when she caught
the jasmine and talc tight on his neck

like a noose. Something must have burst holy out of her
those nights, all night her tongue flailing,

fire coming down through the walls louder
than when they made love and he whimpered afterward.

How I reached into the darkness and tongued
the contours of his sins.

Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

It was a sport I knew little of then
except for the beds in the corners of his eyes

when he returned delicate with his thunders.
He liked golf and always took me to the driving range

afterward, his hand in a glove, holding firm his stick.
Tomorrow, he said, you will learn how to drive.