The Paris Review is looking for new writers. Click here to check out our submission guidelines.

When I picture my father I see the surface of the moon,
plains of moon-stuff chalk-dust papers shredded
by a paper shredder, snowbanks of shredded paper,
nobody to organize it all, no way to “moralize the day
out of its aimlessness,” nobody with a Shop-Vac handy
slowly to turn the whiteness into pattern and form,
revealing, as a chisel reveals in the marble,
a figure, a woman’s figure, an expression of bliss—