I'll read a poem that this rather long, complicated
sounding title comes from, A Probable Volume of Dreams.
It's called "Treetops."
My father moved to the South hunting duck.
It is warm, he has appeared like a ship surfacing
where he floats face up through the duck lands.
Over the tops of trees duck will come
and he strains not to miss seeing the first of each flock.
Although it will be impossible to shoot one
from such an angle, face up like that in a floating coffin
with a lid obstructs half a whole view,
if he has a gun Afterlives are full of such hardships.
One meets for example in one's senselessness high water
and our faithless so the dead wonder if they're imagined,
but they are not quite.
How could they know we know when the Earth shifts
deceptively to set forth ancestors to such pursuits?
My father will be asking, is this fitting?
And I think so, I who with the others coming on the afterlife
after the fact, in a dream, in a probable volume,
in a probable volume of dreams think so.