37   El mundo

Even in dreams, your father is working,

and in the version you’d been having for weeks,

he lifts a large replica of the world, places it

on his back, and because his body here defies

logic and physics, carries it up a hill, which,

after you wake up, you know is a metaphor

for twelve-hour shifts, for pounding nails

into wood, for sliding steel into slots again

and again, and for the days when his back

is shaped into a crooked punctuation,

and his feet, marking the floor into a hieroglyph,

have lost more of their purpose, becoming quiet

when he gets home, so that all you see of him

is not comparisons to language, but two

swollen limbs, a body reclined on a La-Z-Boy,

a father relieved to call this silence his own.

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