The last time I saw my father
was at the La Brea Tar Pits
a year after the divorce.

He was still living in St. Louis, 
running the business
to the bottom
of a fifth of Jim Beam.

In my mind’s eye
he is a specimen, a foetus
of a father, floating in a jar 
in some roadside museum.

I was nine. We had nothing
to say, so he took me
to the La Brea Tar Pits, as
divorced fathers do.

He was a membrane
at that point.
An effigy trembling
in another man’s suit.

We stared
at the three-toed sloth, 
the dire wolf with its
marble eyes. 

My father, I wish
you could rise from that
black pit and emerge

into light, like the tiger
we saw that day, 
sheathed again in muscle, 
its great teeth like sabers.