poems

My grandmother has told me this
many times before: you weren't there
when I was born. You were
somewhere shooting pool,
while my mother screamed,
mostly alone. And I was born
into a sea of women, incubated 
like an egg, while you scratched. 
I've never understood your absence
then. You hoard children now,
like gemstones, even strange ones
you see at restaurants. And after
I was born, you wanted a son so 
desperately that you made one 
with another, kept a stranger, 
because my mother said no.
Half-brothers seem more
than half, connected, I think,
by that strange umbilical cord:
your deficient and obsessional
devotion. And though you broke us
all, still, you made a plan then; two, 
actually. For that, for planning, I am 
grateful. I wish today you could be found 
playing pool at a bar, winning or losing, thinking
you'd much rather be gone
than there, with something
you love too much 
to understand. Though what
is ignorant love worth? 
It was worth nothing. 
But now, you stare at me
blankly, like a child, helplessly 
unable to choose which to drink
first: the milk I've set down, 
or the water.

elegy for my father

By then it took three weeks to retrieve our wasted thoughts

And push them out like smoke from cigarettes.

Like smoke, our words vanished silently, leaving us wondering

At their invisibility.  If words so easily disappear, then what

of their mother?  Our hearts are like father and mother

both.  They give birth like a mother, they wed each other delirious,

humming quietly to smile, but most importantly our hearts leave

like a father:  your heart was forced, barred from mine and barring

itself,  because of a thing more certain than smoke:  choice.

Pablo Neruda Love Sonnet 100 (translation)

hailstormpixie