Poem for My Daughter
The past is a country of windows.
In some of them, faces, their histories
sealed by glass. In others,
white curtains. Shadows without name.
Better to create your own history
out of longing and desire
than to mourn the loss of unknown
faces in the photographs your father left
to you. Better to take loss as part of
memory, that long wind blowing past you
with what’s retrievable, or not.
Remember all the times it snowed so hard
the apple tree would vanish
from your window? Yet it was there.
So with my love. His death. His love.
Keep sight of what’s essential.
How, even in the worst storms,
green and blossom travel from the roots.
*
Shifting
A friend says not to focus on the negative
all the time. Open your eyes to the good,
she tells me on the phone, when my husband
calls out that there’s a dead rabbit
under the deck, having lifted boards
to find out why the sliding glass doors
on the patio won’t close—not because
of the dead rabbit, whose good-luck foot
lies there, all that’s left besides the rib cage
with its beautiful architecture, the fine spine.
A joist has settled, or the piling under it,
evidence that things are always shifting,
nothing is static, not even grief or love.
Nothing’s static but death, my friend says when
I call back with news of the rabbit. At least
once all the decomposing stops. I think of all
the words I’ve written, or spoken, or thought.
Even the saved ones are shifting: a blessing
is not what it was when I was a kid and it came
directly from God. Now it can come from rain,
or the wind, or a child’s sigh as she sleeps.
*
Letter I Should Have Written Years Ago
Neither of you has any idea of the pain ahead.
She’s almost seven, and earlier she cried
because you pulled her front loose tooth,
only your big hand got the other one,
too, the one that wasn’t even loose.
She had to change her shirt for the photo,
it was so bloody. But she’s smiling now,
happy she can sing the song, get a double
visit from the tooth fairy. You’re looking down,
contrite, maybe, or just trying not to laugh.
I’ve never stopped loving her, but when I saw
this old photo, I remembered how I loved you
then, loved your strong, star-athlete body,
the way it wanted me. Before the pain
of seeing how unsuited we were for each other.
I don’t remember when it first began, the falling
out, but no hint of it here. Summer, your skin
beautifully tanned, warm light even inside
the house before those long dark winters.
Forgive me for forgetting who we were then.
*
Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Although she lived in the United States for most of her life, she now lives on Vancouver Island.