proteanme

This is the title of a poem I wrote this summer thinking about my dad dying, which was when I began to get my writing head around the experience. I know I’ve written a lot here in my blog about what it’s been like for me to deal with my dad’s death and I’ve tried hard to do that without a lot of editing or crafting the text. My aim has been to get my feelings and thoughts documented and to connect with other people. The poem is more purposeful – put together in a certain way and the edited and laid out. It did come from something I mentioned in an old post, it just took a while to figure out what I really wanted to say.

Ever since my dad died

I keep waiting for him to show up somewhere.

It’s absurd

the way I’ve looked for hidden messages from him in

songs and poems and tv shows and things my neighbor says,

like how it makes her cringe

when she catches a glimpse of my cat darting

across the street in front of the bus. Have I noticed it’s getting

colder, she asks me and I nod that I have and then stare at the way her

bare feet look as though they’ve been folded into her slippers.

Her ankles are so red.

I have been wearing sweaters a lot lately, I almost say,

which means the tomatoes aren’t going to make it this year,

just like last fall

when the early frost got them.

I went out to the backyard one morning before work

and found them all split on the vine,

small clusters of seeds were spit out into the dirt,

and the Jays were chattering in the branches

that hang over our back door.

Everything dies. Oh, I

get it.