mutating the signature

You’re not awake yet. Where you sleep
is wet and warm and impossible. I picture you
wearing a fantastic bird’s jewel tones, half again
as feathery, wearing a beak trimmed in gold. You’re
pecking at your mother — Wake up, wake up.
You will have a terrible father, a sometimes man,
a smoker. I can’t explain why I do it, the cigarette grabs me
by the shirt buttons, drags me to the alley. Just now
I watched the rain turn to sleet. A storm is when
the sky balls up its fists and knocks on all the windows.
If you want to picture me, start
with a clothespin, stretched into the sunlight
as a swimmer stretches at the buffet, opening the doors
to the store house. I’m twice as pale as that
drawn to a pinch, I have
the temper and airs of a salamander — fiery
and progressively less engaging — tongue
to crest to testes to the tail’s tip, a lizard
known for mumbling poems in the library. You’re not
awake yet, and from where you sleep my voice
comes in as thin as radio at the edges, twice as static,
pointed and dead maybe but defined in waves.
You need to know this world
is no soft crack in the riverbed, it is
not as warm as the imagination of you curled
like some rubber-banded wad of cash I’m earning, you
will never float as easily as you do
now in the last few hours of the life before your life.
You were picked like this — tall and giggly
with lots of hair and your name
drawn from the name of a favorite poet. And
that’s all. The sun is coming through
my blinds, I’ve finished my letter. It is time
to close the book and stare at the wall for a while.