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Happy belated day of the dad! This Father's Day, we're giving props to all the good dads that we can think of: Danny Tanner, Phil Banks, Bob Belcher, Martin Crane, and Jordan Scott, the star of this week's Sunday Poetry.

Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.

space grows
now as two wills
within me
boy
multi-sun
threemoon
futurity
our percussive
story sunrose
your head
just out
between
curio thighs
unword
blood
mellow
uncome
lover’s dog
engorged
fainting
bodies
kelp
fit
voice
inrespiratory ways
it was then
then
I tied you to me
tired beachcrumpled child
filthy in sand
weighs mere lips
my lifelong nuisance
is talk endure air
how ritual fingers
moon up against my leg
bushtits or seacucumbers die
unswizzle mouths tune
atonal moment
then venality, cadence
freon violets
kilowatt vanish
as if the whole world
were spores fleeing
the woods’ wet animal
grams deep in shade
and somewhere
within beesmudge
cold
cryptograms
simply intimacy
simple food
crisp light visible
corpuscular water stashes
under eyes
gyprock body
papering floral pollen
wood carver orange
blew mores
blew entomologist
breath
I to the headstock
to the intercessions
listen
unsound is
electolyrical
grass is
wet
pictogram hill
lost in dew
I
return with your sock
and disassemble the
mind’s agglomerate
mind’s wolverine

Jordan Scott on Night & Ox
When I started writing Night & Ox, I was learning to be a father. I was, as Tom Raworth writes, 'alive and in love' and both completely adrift in this intimacy and completely contained by the rituals of parenting: the bedtime, the snacktime, the naptime, the shit. I wrote this long poem within these rituals, typing the first lines of the poem with one hand, holding my son Sacha as he slept. With his form attached to mine, the lines took on a shallow and hurried breathing, one of restlessness and the infinitesimal movements of a body bound tightly to a larger form.   

Order your copy of Night & Ox here.