poetry
Six
Poems for my Daughter By
MICHAEL LARRAIN Peace for Wilder Kathleen God falls asleep in your
sleep and dreams the day that
got away This is how planets flirt
with one another Here we call it spring and live on the edge of the slowest exaltation The sun comes out when the dead check their
mail and a petal torn in half leaves a white line where the sea used to be You may feel for a moment as silvery-green as a freshly watered plant and then so tired and so
clean that you can touch whatever you imagine Now there’s only one
heartbeat between any two stars Peace Skip
To Ma Loo, My Darling for
Wilder Kathleen When you are especially
sad you know what I mean the times of deep sorrow
visiting you nothing clinical or
jargon-riddled but plain old bluesy
because everything is waving goodbye so
slowly it’s as though the wind in the trees has
your number please remember you are nearer to me than my own
heart and when my head has
exploded from too much of whatever I should have known better
than to have done instead of
swinging you up onto my shoulders we will not stop being
together we’ll be old starlight the quietest wild laughter
ever Better
Still for Wilder Kathleen, in
autumn The world is a very
confusing shirt We wear it when we don’t know what else to wear Misbuttoning rivers with
eyebrows candle-light with
cross-country drives One arm-hole’s an escape
route God cannot even breathe
out of the other But there’s plenty of
Heaven to go around as close as the smells
from the kitchen The stars are making out
in old cars You can foretell the
future after dreaming in black
and white and if your write your
name in the steam from your
bath falling leaves will
uncouple our paths from our
pursuers Better still was the first time you toddled up to me and
said How ya doin’, daddy? and I came truer than the
arrow hurrying toward my throat
in the dark Better
Still for Wilder Kathleen, in
autumn The world is a very
confusing shirt We wear it when we don’t know what else to wear Misbuttoning rivers with
eyebrows candle-light with
cross-country drives One arm-hole’s an escape
route God cannot even breathe
out of the other But there’s plenty of
Heaven to go around as close as the smells
from the kitchen The stars are making out
in old cars You can foretell the
future after dreaming in black
and white and if your write your
name in the steam from your
bath falling leaves will
uncouple our paths from our
pursuers Better still was the first time you toddled up to me and
said How ya doin’, daddy? and I came truer than the
arrow hurrying toward my throat
in the dark Stories for Wilder Kathleen My hands are so old these
days older than my own father’s
hands older and wiser than the
eyes of god’s bartender But my hands have touched your mother’s face cradled her sweet waist and rubbed her feet at
night So they have stories to
tell When memories are all
that’s left my hands will be a land of
plenty Holding her I’ve grown secretly
engaged to all the objects in my
sleep I can stop without
stopping I can even banish absence
if I wish And now there’s you whose long elegant fingers already fluent in
adventure fasten onto the world with
care So many things to be
picked up and the delicate business of setting them down before you can leap out at
me from cupboards and
bedclothes screaming with such savage
joy I have to raise you toward
the sky My hands are so new these
days Some
Detectives for Wilder Kathleen,
watching Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light Your mother came to me with the lingeringest of lips Half-thoughtful and
half-wild A girl who liked to tango
with the tides When she awakened she
remembered almost everything The slow velvet lingerie
of moss pleasuring the branches of
a tree The giggle of water when a
fish goes by Wine putting roots down in
music But there was a single
blind spot in her sleep She didn’t know where to
find you She let me stay close to
her as long as I agreed to
help her look Actually I thought she was helping
me I too had been seeking you ever since my earliest
days Seen your face reflected
in a raindrop on a petal but when I
looked again the depths of a rose
returned the world to me dazzling but impoverished Heard your voice but
couldn’t get that station back though I twirled the dial
until it broke off in my fingers Neither of us dared leave
the other alone for fear they would
discover you and vanish So we kept each other
within arm’s reach Dancing and searching the
dark places We developed elaborate
codes Fell in with criminals Followed the instructions
of train smoke Arranged rendezvous at the
crossroads We stole the identities of
our own dice after rubbing them against
ancient movie stars for luck We looked beyond life and
outside of time Life was of no consequence except as a place to play But a map whose folds are
in two worlds at once can be hard to read There were quarrels
between us, wars, ambushes, double-crosses, dog-fights We kept dancing Sometimes when our leads had dried
up and our hunches got us
nowhere I’d get tired of looking Your features had grown
indistinct I could barely make them
out in a turning leaf Your voice threaded through the surf I mistook for summer
lightning But your mother always
knew you were headed our way Nearer each day the
farther she opened her hope of you A terrifying hope that
scalded my eyes A hope I could not hope to
equal Looking was how she waited I see that now It’s better when you move and dancing was her way of
saying The darkness is made of
singers who cannot tell water
from love So your mother danced indefatigably and I held on for dear
life By now the day we found you was
years ago And watching you dance in front of the television
to the Rolling Stones it finally occurs to me that you were always
dancing with us Waiting and looking in two
worlds at once I saw your mother make
these steps and thought she was
whiling away the time But the two of you were
whiling it into being Some detectives we turned
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