To a Girl Writing Her Father's Death

by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Sometimes the lake water writes and writes and gets
no answer. You tell me, It was just October.
That is good. His voice was full of love and laughter. Not
so good. Full of copper, jacks-of-diamonds, cubes
of honey, I could believe. But I did not know
your father. The moment when the cable is snapped from
the boat has, however, its drama. Yet is not
enough. Try to understand the need out here for
gestures, wind, raw sound. Was it a spasm
of sex in the motor, light shingling
his black hair as the boat spun
on its wide iris down? Were you standing?
I know this must be painful, standing
at the white edge of your page with someone
gone under. You were sixteen and he called you
Princess, though it is a cliche to be
called Princess. And to be sixteen. Yet
I have looked at you and you are not now
much older. You could wear tiaras,
your blonde waves pure as the back
of your knee. Though you wear your carrot rouge
in clumsy circles, which makes me
love you. I have not lost a father
except in dreams. But each one has left
my mouth open. Speak. Make holy
detail. Let the water bead over you like cold
eyeballs. Let in the scream and the lining of the scream
and the prismatic figure eights of oil
mad on the wake---and forgive me
for asking. You have to think of the world
which gave and took your father.
The world which asks for him now.
There's no sense in writing poems unless
you see the mob: We who gather for the red
pulse of every ambulance, we who crowd
lifeguards kissing the still blue lips of
children on the beach, and murmur who
and how, hungry for every morsel
of this life that is not ours, not really. Not
for long. But for the asking.