holding on

Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
Do you think you can tell?

~Roger Waters

in my early 30s I found a letter

in my dead sister’s boxes

my father had written

during her honduran mission:

“rachel is lost,” he’d said.

i still I wonder at his—at her—

smug surety of a way, holding on

to the rod, the iron rod of mormon lore

i sculpted once in early college—

a frieze in low relief, rod receding

in one point perspective, skirting

a great and spacious building—

the rod that rhymes with god in hymns,

not the psalmist’s bludgeon

shattering sinners like pottery,

but lehi’s dream of a handrail,

the one i hoped would keep me

on a righteous path, headed

for a flaming tree. i let it go,

that cold rail, it’s true— that story

i lived in for a time, that borrowed

tune singing me straight. i let go

the rod for broad sky, like my son,

now driving toward oregon,

feeling lost, he told his father,

trying to figure it out, without knowing

what he’s trying to figure out,

which makes me think he has arrived

like i once did, not lost, dear fathers,

but alive, knee aching, armpits

stinking of onions, tapestries filtering

morning light through rolled up windows,

preparing to bathe by spray bottle

in a walmart parking lot, that bardo

where no one lingers long,

holding on to a wheel.

for grey