I've removed the blankets from my bed
although the nights have gotten colder.
I dare not let them touch my skin;
you've left me, carelessly, to smolder.

.                                 
                              ­            oh no
                                wait wait
                                     drift stay
                             want pray
                                 dry soul wet wings
                                        clever clever costly 
                                               things rainy morning 
                                                          long leap heart beat
                                                    beat beat stretch reach
                                                 outgrow  g­od god don't go 
                                          branch water hurry melt did 
                                       you feel like I felt quick fix 
                                          heartsick minx eyes blink blink 
                                      blink hush hush hot blush say  little 
                                   mean much but please come sit touch
                                 bright sun brighter moon pretty promise 
                                  dark room heft spark smoke sigh chest                       
                                    ­rise  rise rise lazy looping butterflies
                                       I want the  night your eyes imply
                                               think fast   breathe  slow
                                                   ­         wait wait wait
                                                            ­           go

Think, small heart.

Don't say
sad eyes know things.

Don't say
hurt things make poems.

I raised you wrong,
told you lies to console you.
Now you speak in five cent fortunes.

Now you don't know anything.

Love defies all laws of perspective;
the farther away               it is
the larger it appears.

Nothing else is like that.

so I thought I might tell you
that my left currently bears
a disappearing crescent of ouch
and three diamonds

or that my right
tends to drift
to the back of my neck
when I'm trying to remember

or that they both stop and start
over these letters
right now,

not sure what to say.

I swore I would not write a poem for my father,
who hated poetry
and poets
and most things,

as though it would dishonor him—
his bookish daughter
who cried too easily;
who sat silently through dinner;
who slipped quietly from rooms
as he entered,

still thinking she was better than him.

Fifteen years later, 
I find myself in Boston,
rattling through cool tunnels
below the city of my birth.
I think I see him—
younger than he could have ever been;
but still, the white t-shirt,
the thin mouth,
the blue eyes that I did not inherit—

and what disturbs me the most
is not that I have just seen my dead father 
step out of a train into
the cool white, 
the great big;
it's that my first thought is

I hope he doesn't see me.

So I am trying to love him.
I am writing a poem for my father
who smelled like
cigarettes
and soap
and sawdust
and raised five girls on a quarryman's pay,

and I am crying,
but it feels different this time.

The storms of late summer did not snap
and surge. The pepper plants did not 
kneel , weary, beneath the rains 
that came
and came.

(or was it a drenched swoon of devotion?)

You didn't hurt my feelings
in an otherwise unremarkable moment
and I didn't react with silence.

I didn't cradle that silence like
a delicate, damaged thing.
(the bird that each of us
tries to save—
shoebox, eyedropper;
our mothers knew it would die,
but let us figure it out)

I didn't have myself convinced
that no one had ever hurt like this.

My silence didn't get deeper.

You didn't wade through it to get to the door.

tactic: write very
small so you have
to lean closer.