Don’t tell your father I never voted for Nixon

Hubert Humphrey

• — Richard Avedon, March 12th, 1976

• Whether or not he won,
• Humphrey looks like the candidate
• who lost: no sensual lip,
• cheeks drawn, eyes slanted
• wary of hawks. Vietnam
• has ended. In a gallery
• crowded with faces looking
• at faces my mother can’t recall
• his name. Don’t tell your father
• I never voted for Nixon.
• Didn’t she watch us
• burning ourselves to hell?
• Over ghost paper, a presence —
• Humphrey’s still here:
• I can almost shake the hand
• of one whose name sounds
• like he shrugs too much, whose face
• loses nothing in gray, born
• in a land of lace and hymnals,
• Sundays spent on church
• and Mondays worrying
• (don’t tell the women)
• what to do about the Russians.

Calendar

• Visit a beekeeper to learn about stings.
• Summer drips cream. Lesson yourself

• in honey, contemplate sidewalk botany —
• penny flowers — talking away

• the day to willing neighbors. Months
• lumber by like streetcars take them slow.

• Only your father seems less than permanent,
• coming and going at hours, while teachers

• sing for a face that’s known to reveal joy.
• Flip switches, toggling between good

• and evil. The world obeys your commands.
• In the evening, clocks and mothers

• return shelter as you gesture toward
• the window and darkness she can’t hear.

Night Sky Calling

• I prick at window-cries
• peek through curtains spy faces

• or listen to drunken voices
• singing off-key but at least

• they’re singing. The same voice
• I’ve heard it more than once

• some woman moaning no.
• How do I keep what’s mine

• from hers? Squeaky-mouthed
• hooker who curses out her john

• forgoes the rules of traffic.
• Midnight invaders want nothing

• but a night-share on these streets
• which seem so placid by day.

Keith Ekiss is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. He is the author of Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010) and translator of The Fire’s Journey, an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio forthcoming from Tavern Books in four volumes. Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio was published in spring 2016 by the Bitter Oleander Press. He is a former Robert Frost Fellow in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.