When you saved me, father, saved me from drowning
though the Atlantic that tried to drown me called me back
I burned my shoulders in the sun as I buried you in sand

from your chin to your toes, while you lay like a dead man
with crazy hair, snoozing with fag in mouth,
your ribs rising. It felt like an act of commitment

to bury you, to dredge the moat around you deeper
and deeper, leaving your head exposed and smoke to rise.
I was kept ashore for safety, but wanted to wade back

into the glimmering—where light perched, it tilted and dipped.
Now I had a new mother, I thought, who'd taught me
the vitality of fear which felt like reverence,

I needed to do it well, tamping from end to end:
to bury my father, who snoozed, in a dolmen of wet sand.