Iconic
In the city’s daytime dumpster  
I saw a holy fool, my father,  
feeling out frozen bits of potato.  
  
What is my father doing in Moscow,  
far from the Minnesota woods,  
their clean deer with kingly horns?  
  
In falling snow, two brothers  
with a hand-pulled cart pass,  
both of their noses smashed  
  
in different directions. There is  
too much white here, and where  
are your shoes? Your private faith,  
  
burning, a wooden cross on iced chains  
around your neck— am I to be lost  
for this, for seared paint blistering  
  
from a rotting plank? When  
at last you look my way,  
your shocked hair a tangled wreath:  
  
physicist, baker, wild dove. 
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