For My Daughter

Now that the last grandparent's dead,
now that there's one more date
I must remember by     — I'm thinking of you
Arlene     — of Marion     — lost
as the ruins we were     — figured on divorcing —
referring ourselves to love
among the many worn beauties.  But
maybe there's something
even here     — with every sureness visiting
/ every sureness failing —
something that words cannot describe —
said to the stubble     / the steel blues
and flatland granaries     — to offer you ease
Arlene     — to approach you now
across eight hundred miles     — if only
the facts may be     — a woman
released from that decline     — unable
to insist another instant
in the world.

I think how a body     — with one more
dark night to remember     — kept up
past critique     — beyond the names she meant
or might have meant to share with faces
/ the streets that were some place once
and somewhere in New England —
with their schoolgirls     / ballplayers —
with names she had whispered once
and names you might read back
among your sportscards.


*


And now that you're twenty-one —
now that she's buried     / principled
and gathered for abstracting     — gone
as a marriage once —
without a blueprint for survival     — and
as her brother is tonight —
falling away into his moods and his confusion —
knowing the call     / the conversation's
much too much for him     — I send you
these words to share     — that
will have to do for breath     / for the warmth
and musculature and embrace
and the consoling     — whole fields gone
I think     — and whole buildings lost
she'd known by first names
then by nicknames.

*

And now that she's gone past wearying —
now that we've made lifetimes
and common sense out of divorces —
of evenings and uphill walks
and harbor views and pyrotechnics —
depending
which year that was     / which holiday  —
I'm weighing your own
/ her own sweet solace to completion —
until I can miss the place
almost     — for all of the old mistakes
and bearings ruined by fictions
/ for all of that terrible math —
brought more than once
then more than once
to your surprising.

Before you were born     —two dead —
another      — and now this last
I must suppose I cannot speak for —
chosen and moored let's say     — gone
as she seems to what might be
another country     / another universe —
and there with her sisters dead —
as another Friday comes     / as the starlight
welcomes her     — adding
her own to all the weekend's absences
and shadows —
gone to that oldest staggering     / into
this view she shares     — come
arm-in-arm     / with the likes
of her dead husband.

I'm crossing these lines Arlene
/ these miles between and more
than the balloonists ever spoke for
/ than the refrains filled in —
knowing how little the matters of fact
can seem to matter     — crossing
these lines if always / even only alien —
while all of the absence occupies —
and all of that empyting away
that follows now in the subtracting —
to wish you ahead Arlene / ahead
and now your own ways
through the counting.

 

© Appetite (2)