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\u00a0a lot here in my blog\u00a0about 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.<\/p>\n
Ever since my dad died<\/p>\n
I keep waiting for him to show up somewhere.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s absurd<\/p>\n
the way I\u2019ve looked for hidden messages from him in<\/p>\n
songs and poems and tv shows and things my neighbor says,<\/p>\n
like how it makes her cringe<\/p>\n
when she catches a glimpse of my cat darting<\/p>\n
across the street in front of the bus. Have I noticed it\u2019s getting<\/p>\n
colder, she asks me and I nod that I have and then stare at the way her<\/p>\n
bare feet look as though they\u2019ve been folded into her slippers.<\/p>\n
Her ankles are so red.<\/p>\n
I have been wearing sweaters a lot lately, I almost say,<\/p>\n
which means the tomatoes aren\u2019t going to make it this year,<\/p>\n
just like last fall<\/p>\n
when the early frost got them.<\/p>\n
I went out to the backyard one morning before work<\/p>\n
and found them all split on the vine,<\/p>\n
small clusters of seeds were spit out into the dirt,<\/p>\n
and the Jays were chattering in the branches<\/p>\n
that hang over our back door.<\/p>\n
Everything dies. Oh, I<\/p>\n
get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0a lot here in my blog\u00a0about what it’s been like for me to deal with my dad’s death and I’ve tried hard to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}