My father hides a pipe in his desk:
Long, slender, worn lip-perfect,
smelling of ancient grains & leisure.
It belonged to his grandmother, he says.
It’s funny what fathers choose to hide.
He says he knew some men
in the Old Quarter who smoked hashish
but not him, he says, never him.

When I was six I dove deep
into the forbidden drawers, drew out
all sorts of inscrutables: dismembered
Aramaic codas, hand-drawn maps,
faded photographs, ancient wood chips,
& the pipe, that impossible artifact.
I pressed its giving wood to my skin,
afraid the furious curator would storm in.

When I was eight I discovered
a photo tucked behind the couch
of my father standing shirtless
on a beach, pipe in hand, beard askew,
chuckling his fault line
at an anonymous camera operator.
Later, when I sat at the dinner table,
my mother said I had seen a ghost.

My father is assembling a family tree.
It’s winter. All the leaves have fallen.
He is left with branches he uses
to flog me in case I forget the bark
we share, but nobody told him
an uprooted tree sometimes dies.
If I had flame I’d set it all ablaze,
except the hardwood of that pipe.

We’ve never spoken of great-grams.
(Nor do we call her great-grams.)
You can’t call a specter, spread gossip
like red caviar on toasted Lavash
while she yells into the receiver.
You can hold the pipe in your hand,
hope you once belonged to this relic.
a nomadic family who can’t find the desert.

One day I will embark on an excavation,
don my Tilly hat, the khaki neck cloth
billowing in the cruel desert wind,
take out my trowel, my dust brush,
my diamond-tipped pick,
dig out that goddamned pipe; it will be mine.
I’ll find the Old Quarter, buy some hash,
hand it over to my father & say,

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.