Missing Persons Poem by Kevin Kiely

‘Monday Blue' half-price cocktails—

the cartoon-artist talks too little for this long night, and draws
Lenin's flat-cap, a gaunt Bolshevik with torn coat
red star on one lapel: another persona of her father who jumped
on a freight train leaving home in Portland, Oregon
she ‘never knew enough of him to know him. He seldom made contact, died.'

she forgot him. ‘I suppose so', I say and mumble about my father asleep
in Northern Idaho, aslant in slatted sunshine alongside a café—
far from Ireland, the king of coffee and cigarettes, clutching his book
fingers marking the page, impossible to see the title as the lights changed.

crossing the parched Rio Grande in May, I checked into ‘The Sagebrush Motel'
rain boiled on the roof as if cooking sky falls of rice for supper
father left me a golf ball behind blue crouching US Mail Boxes
had he abandoned the tee-off shot into Canada?

wake up old man there is much to ask, much to tell you...
I heard that the day you passed-on, a visitor had left his hat in the hospital ward
how you held the brim as the frosts and blizzards of death chalked your face
if I circle back and look for parking, will your seat be empty…
how about a walk through the golden-fleece wheat fields of the Palouse?