later - have redone the whole ending, and am much happier with it now. it's true now. :)
(except the title. i can't do titles.)
(except the title. i can't do titles.)
Coming and Going
I remember the first time I re-met you
As an adult; it had been three years
Or so. I had fallen in love, gotten engaged,
Since I last saw you, and you had fallen out of it
And lived with your dogs.
You hugged your daughter first, in the kitchen doorway,
And then your son-in-law, who was inwardly
Pleased that you had driven up without coercion.
The kids bounced off your knees, running circles, bubbling
"Papaw!" Later we sat on the couch
And you grilled me about this guy,
Brandished pictures of a new dog
On a newer cell phone that wouldn't text.
Somehow we started talking books, comparing Joyce episodes,
And we finished a sentence about being locked in a closet with King
Together and just laughed. Somehow
You are me, fifty years older and wary with
The lives scattered behind you - four daughters,
Three wives, each dropped in a different city.
You have a gentle forehead, you never meant
To hurt anyone, but your eyes are large
With cowardice. As are mine. I detect
The same reluctance to move in, settle down,
The same nameless dissatisfaction
With life in myself. You are atoning now,
And moving to Belize, which I will follow
When I am sixty as well, but I am terrified
That I will also break the people I love
In all sincerity. Surely you loved them all.
And yet our notion of love is not enough.
The guy we talked about that afternoon -
I loved him as fervently as I knew how, and likely
For longer than I should have,
But that wasn't gravity enough to hold
The universe from spinning into the night.
I am moving to Chicago next year,
As soon as I have sorted all this out,
And alone. Maybe I will get a Doberman.
Sometimes when I am speeding in the dark
It occurs to me that I am selfish,
Stubborn, proud, demanding of space.
I may have been unloveable
For a very long time.
It also occurs to me that I would be content
To drive on forever; my dreams
Are of places and concepts, not people.
Here again I am your granddaughter:
If all the rest of the world,
Beating against the bars as it does for love,
Still struggles to keep it, why should we,
Who have pragmatically ceased to seek it,
Be the ones to own it at all? Are we
Defective? Suspect, unable to maintain
Another person? Is it written across my forehead
That I will never need them so much as they need me?
But we are different, you and I; I am also a child of
Your wife, who was last in a long line
Of Weaver women, keen, tenacious,
Griffin matriarchs, dichotomies of
Diaphanous wings and harsh tongues.
I have seen my own parents recoil
And consciously eschew your legacies.
And I do love -
Many, and very well, even the dangerous
Who doubt sincerity universally.
I have misloved, but never unloved,
And never in fear.
And I would like to think
There is redemption for us both; you were
Striking out at the world, as hard and fast as you could.
That was a haymaker in a glass town
Fogged with the breath of your mother
Who never told you she had cancer.
I can nearly understand the rebellion, then the fear -
An affair, a pregnancy, and finally
Stripping the bank account of your little girls.
I can fathom the how.
But I have passed through my own waters -
I looked that boy in the face when he said
He had not loved me for some time,
And I swallowed it and spit it out and
I still love people. He even says
Every once in a while
That he misses me, and I do not break
Anything. I can still see
Sparrows clinging to fence tops like dust,
Glimpse the great portentous fact of the world that is love,
That from which you have been running so long.
I have seen it, Papaw. It sits in the corner of a coffee shop,
Sings between the stars, far outside you and me
And the shards of other souls we mince around.
It will come to you when you stop swinging.
Love will come.
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