For Fathers, (2001)

That was the fall my dad
raked up all the leaves into a towering
pile underneath our maple tree, hoisted

me, in my faded Kermit T-shirt and green suspenders,
within reach of a sound branch to sway,
an aging street sign hanging outside

a corner store, screeching with nervous joy
as if rusted to the joints at the mercy of the cool breeze,
until I finally submitted to the burn

on my palms and dropped into the crackling browns,
reds, and yellows
It was a bad time to be a muppet

Jim Henson died that month, leaving all his creations
like glassy-eyed mourners, unable to marionette past
the casket of their bearded father, but Sesame Street still

came on at the same time everyday, preserving
the man and his colorful world for my brother and me,
who never noticed that the fleshy residents like Gordon

living there talked to their furry friends with the earnest woe
of a soldier talking to the widow of his fallen general
Out of the leaves I was yanked,

out of my Labor Day fun, out of my Kermit T-shirt,
out of my suspenders, and into a classroom
where I felt like I was dropping from that branch

when I met my classmate
who had dark skin just like Gordon
but got mad like Oscar the Grouch when I asked him

why his name wasn't Gordon too.
I shed my book bag like a snake ridding itself of a layer of
skin slithered back through a pass in the leaf mountain

once the bus doors shut
on my first day of school, to lie still
in the pile of my dad's absence and the sun’s comfort

unable to return to hanging like the firm sign on the branch
to devote all my senses to my shield
of leaves, trying to understand how two of them could be

different colors and seem identical when
I hid my eyes beneath the mess.