Andrew Koch

Children’s Bible

In this story my father is the angel
whose face we can’t quite see
walking around on our roof.
Saturday morning, he climbed up there
with his tools and won’t answer
when we call to him. And in this story
my father stands at the pulpit, dressed
in holy garments, describing
my transgressions to the crowd.
In the animal musk in the bowels
of the ark my father walks, his torch’s
reflection sputtering in the black eyes
of two elephants. They can tell there
is something he isn’t saying. And in this story,
he spits into his comb and runs it through
my hair. “Stay down,” he tells my hair.
And it does. And in this story Samson
never cuts his, and my father is the jaw
of the donkey Samson picks up,
my father each body in the vanquished heaps,
blue fire burning in the eyes of each corpse
when, in chorus, they ask, “Do you want me
to give you something to cry about?”
My father smears mud in his face,
says, “It is good,” then leaves it in
for years. And in this story my father
begins driving before dawn,
the rest of us sleeping in the back
until we reach the woods, where
we’re surrounded by bison, a family
of hundreds, moving with singular purpose.
Watching them, my father says nothing,
his silence its own proverb. Or, his silence
everything he cannot say about the burden
a family is. And in this story
it’s been nighttime in Eden for a long time.
The wind blows cold, and palm trees cast
ecstatic shadows in the pale light
of the telephone poles. And my father stands
at the gate where God left him, alone
with the fluttering of his flaming sword.
And he never sleeps. And he never speaks.
And he tries to remember where his children are.

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Andrew Koch is a writer and educator living in Nashville. His writing has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize for emerging writers and holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of North Texas.