My Father at Seventy

In the warm shallows of summer nights
my father walks with coyotes.

In the hours when the sleep I’ve chased finally arrives
he hears them, yipping in the distance

And he rises, pulls on his boots and tramps
outside the breezy tall-ceilinged house

Where he lives alone in the Chinese village along
the Sacramento River.

They don’t bother him, he says,
but there is something about the way

Their voices get louder as he walks in the moonlight
along the levee, louder

And then softer, fading away when he stops.
At home they find their way into his dreams,

Green eyes arranged in untidy rows,
shaggy dog-heads

Outlined in gray against the black night.
My father, open-eyed on his

Bed in the deep summer quiet
remembers the coyote

Almost forty years past, the one he shot
to protect my little brother and me,

One charmed summer.


(“My Father at Seventy” first appeared in The Bohemian, Spring 2005.)