Ocean Vuong - In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek to a Beached Dolphin's Wet Back lyrics

& close his eyes. His hair the shade of its cracked flesh. His right arm, inked with three falling phoenixes--torches marking the lives he had or had not taken -- cradles the pinkish snout. Its teeth gleaming like bullets. Huey. Tomahawk. Semi -automatic. I was static as we sat in the Nissan, watching waves brush over our breaths when he broke for shore, hobbled on his gimp leg. Mustard -yellow North Fave jacket diminishing toward the grey life smeared into ours. Shrapnel -strapped. Bushwhacker. The last time I saw him run like that, he had a hammer in his fist, mother a nail-length out of reach. America. America a row of streetlights flickering on his whiskey -lips as we ran. A family screaming down Franklin Ave. ADD. PTST. POW. Pow. Pow. Pow says the sniper. f** you says the father, tracers splashing through the palm leaves. Confetti green, how I want you green. Green despite the red despite the rest. His knees sunk in ink-black mud, he guides a ribbon of water to the pulsing blowhole. Ok. Okay. AK -47. I am eleven only once as he kneels to gather the wet refugee into his arms. Waves swallowing his legs. The dolphin's eye gasping like a newborn's mouth. & once more I am swinging open the pa**enger door. I am running toward a rusted horizon, running out of a country to run out of. I am chasing my father the way the dead chase after days -- & although I am still too far to hear it, I can tell, by the way his neck tilts to one side, as if broken, that he is singing my favorite song to his empty hands.