Night Of 1000 Apophases

after Kaveh Akbar

My father siphons the dreams
out of my forehead before bed.
He draws out every last drop
& what is left?
A chill prowling in the valley.
Chimneys hacking the apparitions of coal.
Fireworks sounding their sermon between
the lights across the hill.
This must be what it feels like to be
a message from heaven
before the augur arrives.
I wake in the middle of the night
to look everywhere for where he
might have put them: back & forth through
the pipes of our house, every book &
pillow turned inside out, the dirt scraped
from his fingernails, rummaging through
the words snored upward in the deep of his sleep. I wish
he would love me less kenotically, but god knows
how I love the way of looking that comes in the losing,
a wilder kind of holiness. One where we both
learn that god is a spoon, therefore so are we.