We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.
Here we could place the memory of my sister,
his daughter, who died after a car wreck.
Wedge her into the smoky path
& cover her in sunlight.
The family next door is raking leaves in the yard.
A father scolds his children for jumping
into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon.
We cannot hear them from inside,
but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them
around the waist & spins.
I wait for the ending to my father’ s story,
but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence
of bullets frozen there in his mind.