My father at sunset

The sunset was covered by clouds.

From the hilltop, a glint no bigger

than a sliced orange was visible above the horizon.

A man hiked there every evening

to watch for the flash.

The man up there was old, could’ve been nicknamed

“Reverend.” He addressed God as “Father” and read the world

like the Bible. Up on the hill, he had a dog and pocketknife with him,

blue and rusty, respectively. Someone else had been there

on the hill drinking. The man poked at a fire ring;

his dog licked vomit off a rock.

“Stop that,” the man said,

and the dog stopped.

It wasn’t legal to drink on the hill, owned by the government,

but the man brought a beer in his knapsack.

He sat down with it, and the dog walked over beside him,

melding into his thick profile—flat at the top

from a military haircut. He called the dog warm

and scratched its back. “The sun drops quickly,”

he said to the air.

And it did. Just as the top appeared below the clouds

it sank into the earth. “No green flash.”

It was December but not very cold. The sky looked light,

the grass and rocks around the hill, gray.

There was a quicker way down,

but the man took a meandering path to avoid cactus.

Those plants were always green.