My father bought a suit, cut his long hair
then hitchhiked into Wichita, looking
for a new wife. We moved to a trailer
on Chicken Hill, where the steep roads would freeze
solid every winter. He sent money,
we waited. I would lay in bed dreaming
of him walking alone by a highway,
a thick paperback Bhagavad Gita
jutting from his rucksack, the low sun
suspended in his breath, his left hand stretched
out to the road below the horizon,
the Vitarka mudra. I pretended
it was a myth. He saw it as penance.
Our mother told us it was cowardice.