Wait, please—
don't go.
There's something I
need you to know;

when I fall,
it's headlong
and this poem,
these poems,
are all wrong.

Monsieur Polti wrote of
thirty-six dramatic situations
that you and I
as pro- and ant- agonist
may find ourselves in.

I think we could survive
all but two or three.

My father taught me to swim
by holding my small body
tightly  
and stepping off
the highest ledge
at Horses' Heaven,

indifferent to my pleas 
for release, to play safely
with my sisters
on the ******* below.

I had time to notice gravity
before the cold river 
swallowed us 

and as I fought
to keep him from slipping
through my stinging hands

he let go.

It was a long, dark panic.
I'm still afraid of the deep.

I wonder what learning to love 
might have been like
had I learned to swim 
in a shallow pool,

with a patient teacher.

You have a flying machine.
I have the afternoon off.
Let's meet where we used to,

huddled under mossy eaves,
fumbling with rented keys;

you can call me Gypsy Rose 
and I can call you Captain.

We drift along through moss and moon,
the currents swift from love's typhoons,

skim fingertips through stirred up sins;
we never speak of daybreak things.

What I wouldn't give
to know the comet tails of thought
obscured by your  ellipses …

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.