You don't mention whom you met,
How you ripped your small black dress.
You don't share intimate stories;
What caused a smile,
What stokes your worries.
Arms dangle by your side,
You can't slip your hand in mine,
Hold me with your eyes,
Lay your head on my bed
With your good-night sigh.
We don't get our get-aways
As we did in by-gone days;
You left your keys to house and car,
Saying you would travel far;
So you hitched your hidden dreams
To a rising star,
Left my world, but not my life,
Polished your new cultured pearls.
Husbands now call you wives;
But you'll always be
My three wee girls.

I reject the likeness of you _
To resolve this, I lied and become the finest of you

I reject the sameness as you _
To avoid this, dishonesty pleasures—
I believe the untruth

I reject the appearance of you _
Through the looking glass I continuously hate the one who stares back at me

I reject your charm _
Where most who encounter me seems to be magnetize to my own charisma

I reject the way you think
And here I am discerning how not to be you

I reject your cheating heart
I saw mom suffer from this and yet I cheated

I reject your rejection
Where I thought I forgive but I still despised your presence in my head...

On Father's Day, we pause,
Reflect on our dad, with cause,
A stoic, smiling, gentle man,
A gift to any woman,
But brave, a digger,
He beat the ****, ripper,
Our land is free,
Because of the brave, you see,
Let's celebrate dads and liberty!

Dad,
Can it be that you are gone now,
Five years' comings and goings,
Five solar journeys now, around the sun?

I can still see your shape,
Thin and worn,
Overalls, too big,
Cap pulled down,
Pliers hanging at your side,
Lace-up boots, worn,
And your face, lined,
Eyes still twinkling, though
Weary after a day's work,
Fixing,
Farming,
Fencing,
Feeding.

In my mind, you're
Going off to the barn,
To hay the cows,
Like an old imam
Heading mechanically
To daily prayers,
Moved by routines
Impossible to ignore.

The man and the work,
So embedded in the other...
No more thought of leaving -
Though as a younger man,
You spoke of some day retiring -
There was no way, and no desire,
Farming was your one remaining fire.

So, five years are gone,
And yet, everything still
Standing on the farm
Bears resemblances of you.

The peeling buildings, sagging still,
The gravel paths you tended,
The panels your hands welded,
The barns and sheds you built
Still stand, and bear the evidence
Of Arthur Bouchard's hands.

The last time I wore a suit was
    my high school prom. A
grateful world has left me,
    without funerals to attend.

The last time I wore a jonny,
    I danced the wind in dad's room.
Machines that beeped and whirred
    were somehow keeping him alive.

When I finally picked the phone up,
    we'd already talked, two hours.
The person, your disease has curtained,
    read my poems for the camera.

The last time we got high, I wanted you
    to hear that Strokes song, and
listen to you list objections, to our
    sharing a kiss.

I'll take a dare, and tell the truth
    to you, over phenomenal music and
exhaust. I'll be desperate if you promise
    to stay as vulnerable as you know how to be.

The last time we took the car together,
    I remember you weren't so afraid.
The next time you try being alone with me
    I'll insist I shouldn't be driving.

The last few times I'd felt brave enough,
    but courage never serves me. If the
Queen's decided not-to, it's as
    sure as our demise is.

And all-Earth smells like a lake town,
    hurts, just like a headache, can't get
all the ink-out, blinking
    at the sky.

The last time I felt so alive we
    were driving some way, that you
realized, halfway-there, you're
    sick-of.

On a runaway ride out from trouble
    the passenger seat always
seems to be
    empty.

There's this little part of me sometimes
Who wants to know her father,
But the real her does not
Because she knows the one she would want
Is the complete opposite of reality.
But you see that's fine, really,
Because she could never find him anyway.
Her mother chases her kids father figures away,
Except just now it seemed their dads
Were coming back for them.
But my father can never come back for me.
You can't miss what you've never had
And I've heard that saying for a very long time,
That man that I don't want to know,
The one I shed tears for as a child,
I doubt knows that I exist.
So he can't come and find me,
But if he could I doubt he would anyway.
So still I will just have to say:
That you can't have what you haven't got.

Not real people,
just characters,
defamiliarized,
playacting through
the stage dressing
of their
unconvincing, plywood
lives.
In one small spotlight,
one character
is deciding
not to call
the other character,
and a
second spotlight
picks out a
telephone
not ringing, and
the second character,
who could
call the first,
but doesn't.
Between them,
the few metres of
darkened stage
represent the cold,
separating sea, or
their emotional
estrangement, or
the shadowy uknowability of
the inner self, or
something.
They don't elicit sympathy,
these characters, only perhaps
an intellectual empathy,
critical and objective.
They are devices
by which we might learn
some abstract lesson about
the human condition.
They cry, or don't,
soliloquise about their fears,
their guilts and their woundings,
or are silent;
they damage each other,
themselves, and seem
incapable of learning
from pain.
But they are not
real people,
only symbols,
only the roles
they occupy:
Father,
Daughter.
It might be heartbreaking,
if it wasn't all so
far away.

In your bleeding cross-section I count
three centuries of wooden wisdom
since that mother cone dropped
on soil no one owned.
Black bears scratched backs
against your young bark. Ohlone
passed peacefully on their path
to the waters of La Honda Creek.

In my lifetime you groaned.
Your bark filled with beetles.
Woodpeckers drilled, feasted.
Needles, whole limbs,
you shed your clothes,
stood naked. I cut your flesh.  

You walloped the earth, creating a trench
two hundred feet long where you lie.
As you fell in your fury
you destroyed my tomatoes,
smashed the daffodils,
snapped a dogwood.

Better you crush my garden than my house
which did not exist nor any of this town
when you first advanced one tender green.
I want to believe the sawtooth less cruel
than another winter of storms.

All good fathers must fall.
Your children surround you,
waving, blocking the light.
My children count rings,
hands sticky with sap.

You will always be my little girl
Though now a woman in your own right,
And as you step out into the world
I pray to God you will be alright.
Though in cotton wool I would wrap you
To keep you from all harm if I could,
I understand that if I were to
That I would do you more harm than good.
Over the past few years you have grown
Into a wonderful young lady;
The strength of character you have shown
Tells me I have no need to worry.
So go girl! Do what you have to do,
There's a great big world waiting for you!
But remember, whatever you do,
That I shall always be here for you.
Love Dad x