The sky is scored with home-going, scarred hard
by chemtrails, as blue as leave-taking feels. A sky
full of daughters fleeing fathers of all kinds:
the one who wasn’t there, the one who got too close,

the one whose demons masked his face for so long
the mask adhered. A sky full, too, of fathers: staring
into space, reading the next line of fine print, working,
returning finally after half a lifetime. I come home

to find my father’s brain writhing with mice, its knot
of odd cells hungry, proliferent. They only want
to live and make more like themselves, so
how can I blame them, yet I do. My father’s brain

streaked with chemicals, with the exhaust
of sixty years. My father’s brain a nest of vermin
curled inside a warm wall, a mess of silent
vipers, a mist of life and loss. My father once said

his job was finding money, and now I know the cost.
A house that empties though it’s full.
A capsule hurtling towards the earth.