I found the orchard anxious with bees and a bowlegged dog
and I knew I was home.

On the opposite hill, the houses strung out like laundry
along the ridge lines and the fields face up.

Shuttling sun. The neighbor lady
sweeping as if god said, Sweep.

I found my father with a seed catalogue and a blue plastic pail.
Hold this, he says, Hold still.

For years I found his shirts in my closet. Apparently the way
I scratch my head is his.

I saw him later at the gas station and spent two nights across
from his ruined face in a bar.

After the music stopped I went on
more or less singing.

In one story we can't stop playing whiffle ball, the trees
done up in uniforms of dusk.

In another my friends and I phone every Richard in the book
including Richard Richards

who is a cousin. I remember a brief cameo with a fire engine,
the sunflowers grown stiff and bankrupt

in the yard, unrelenting.
I have the pictures.

They show a man younger than myself with something like evening
settling beneath his eyeglasses,

the afternoon so warm and simple it looks ridiculous
to believe in a day like that.