We still think
we're ripe figs, saplings
green and sweet 'neath supple
bark, hearts still sticky,
fruit still ****.

woke every morning and
dressed in the sun, then
dreamt in the breezeway
where the day's laundry
hung. She listened for
him in the summery hum;
sometimes she was honey,
sometimes she was stung.

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.

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.

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.

i.
In Toronto, we could lean out the kitchen window
and steal pears from the neighbor's tree.

ii.
It was the first time I had seen my sister in years.
We climbed a hill to pick wild plums.

iii.
He said I'll eat one if you do.
We laughed around our crabapple kisses.

I didn't know your name back then.
I practiced love with other men.
I burned my lips on words like yes.
I didn't know your name back then.

I practiced love with other men—
a reckless, shipwrecked malcontent;
a willing, waiting queen undressed,

I burned my lips on words like yes.
I warmly, weakly acquiesced
and woke to wonder if I'd dreamt.

I didn't know your name back then.
I studied sin with other men
and broke my heart on words like when.

If I wrote you the shortest poem,
a word, or less
that said as much as any
poem, or more;

worked through this night, and the next;
by sunlight,  lamp light
head bent over every word I've ever written
and all the words I haven't learned;

if sometimes I cried, and thought I'd never stop,
and sometimes I found a word
that was not the right word
but it was a good word,
a perfectly sweet word
so I held it to my chest for a while;
curled up in bed with it,
stood there, waving
long after it was gone;

if I wrote you the shortest poem
and rode my bike to your house
because I wanted to give it to you
while it was still warm,

would your door be open?
Would you smile for days?

Be reckless with your words to me;
incite, provoke, use words as lips
and teeth and hands and silk restraints.
Press them deep into my skin –
leave marks, leave late, and come again.