My father’s heart is a little red car
he parks in the garage with his golf clubs and gun.

My father’s heart is Dick Cheney in a wheelchair
with a black hat on.

My father’s heart is a truckload of tomatoes,
a dead Vargas girl tucked
under the mounds of waxy fruit.

My father’s heart bleeds and bleeds into a glass tumbler.
He drinks it over ice every day at half past five.

When he dozes off, the moon creeps up
the walls of his big house, its oleander eye 

making the trees glow outside.
                                           And the leaves 

on the ghost trees quiver. He wakes and looking out
sees his children in their green, flickering shapes.

My father’s heart leaps with longing; it reels,
but the windows are shut, sealed tight.

And nothing, not even his God, gets in.