Deepwater

I have my father’s hair. Not much of a gift,

     Thick cloud blasting out of my head,

          fat as baleen. The word, his tongue slugs

against the roof of his mouth, is adsorbant,

    and he insists on the prefix in a coda of clicks:

          ad-     ad-     ad’yer see? like a whale, spearing

its noise into the dark. Grows like bone,

    does hair, strengthens against stress, all our

          violences legible in horn, hoof, feather,

the warm ocher of his thumbnail as he turns

    the beak over. I am naked, watching the plug

          braid a borehole, my fragrant grief: tobacco, lanolin,

bacon spit, grease. And he is starting to plait my wet hair,

    passing forward fresh streams to dark slick

          over my shoulders and asking me to guess the weight

of disaster. Absently, I count a kink from flu, a thickening

    for love, golden crown and here, at the root, a length of gray.

          You tell by the color of the waves, he shrugs, walks

to his bookshelf on the landing, holds out a finger, divines

    red, black, hardback, glaucous, yellow spine torn, a gap:

          here, between books, he leaves the kittiwake beak

after dabbing it like a glass pipette at my cheek.

    Abacinate. Abscess. Abyss. Ab ovo. At Macondo, he reads

          people sent sponges, lambs’ wool, soil, books, anything

     the little girls, bagged their hair to make a gluey boom,

          suck it up, the spoils. He starts to towel me down, tells me

that’s what happens to naughty children, guides my feet

    into my socks and the kittiwake beak, his grim memento,

          watches through nostrils, observes our wincing fractures.

My hair dries, keratin core still recording a damaged archive

    of  him, katabatic debris, red algae, bad blood cut

          in cross sections of arctic ice. But they didn’t

use any of it. They used their own ends to end the spill:

    propylene sacks sent to drink its own kin. Ad absurdum. Ad fin.

Ad creep. Adagio. Adam. I asked him what happened to all the hair,

          but he said that’s not the point of the story.