We Water Them With Salted Tears

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The house was quiet.
I possessed it like a living room sofa,
undulating and awkward.

My father’s voice was alive and ripe,
winding through the halls and growing
under our bedroom doors.

In the mornings, I’d perch on the mahogany,
steeped in lost wax and porcelain.

We lived on water and salt and tangles of trees;
with time cascading into delineated aisles.

I was entirely alone there, hearing bubbles lift
and crunch through the mangroves.

And there I’d stay ‘til my
father’s lips met the conch shell horn,
calling me home, where I would dream of long handled nets.
 
 
I was a naked baby on a curving palm,
a tarp lined swimming pool, a large and smiling
Italian family in the back yard with sangria and cacti
and boats named after lovers.

My father was surrounded by men with stiff
drinks in chiseled glasses talking quietly
about those things that make men men.

My father glanced at me and smiled
(crows feet and twinkle).
 
 
I was eleven when I became a woman,
sitting in an inflatable boat,
watching the clear water that lined the plastic turn red
and I was fifteen when my father died.

I rested my hand on his arm as I spoke.
It left a mark like a child walking on wet sand.