gentlemen who make a living as poets, fathers, physicists, lovers

I think about how your hair is sheared short
as though you were an apple tree,
your branches cut into small, fragile pieces. 
when my father passed away, I printed out his university faculty
page and buried it beneath an apple tree with hope
that it would grow me a new father.

I miss him for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness, how:
1. he’s a dead man with a body like a trout 
who has just ripped off its scales. 
2. he’s a dead man who, before he died, liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town.
3. in my dreams, he's a dead man 
with no hands with which to shoot.
4. he is a dead man. 

here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare.
here: this is an experiment.
here: my father knows a lot about experiments, 
about how they’re stories of death, mostly.
here: on Judgment Day, on the day my father died,
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them: 

we go into the woods 
just to touch each other’s faces,
trace the slopes of each other's noses.
you tell me that I got my nose from my father,
aquiline. I imagine his (our)
nose(s) bleeding in his (our) sleep.