To My Father / For His Other Family
(After Ocean Vuong)
Steve Merino
Dad, don’t be afraid.
We are a people of lakes & spinning rivers.
We know how to hold what won’t speak.
Look, our eyes
have seen different scars, but
I still move like the ghosts
haunting
what we are afraid to say.
No, we don’t have a common language.
Someday, perhaps, we will find it
searching in mom’s garden, lodged in some scrapyard muffler.
Once, before you met my mother,
you were in love.
Had a whole family before ours where you must
have enjoyed happy days
& now as if something of only dream,
completely forgotten.
Ok, I don’t want to believe what I come from:
you left
& I’m trying not to live in your mistakes, but
something inside me was always broken.
Do you understand? You cried when your mother died
but not theirs. Didn’t attend the funeral.
How I never want to feel so much
ambivalence and yet I already do.
I close my eyes and think of my half-brother
waiting for you to call on his birthday. Close
my eyes & keep hearing revolving doors.
From you, I learned to praise the absence of being there,
the weight of silence in a throat.
From them,
I learned to praise the art of holding on.
If you seek forgiveness, I
am not the place to start. I have my own to seek.
Where to begin?
This river only ever
keeps going. How it is always November in
my wrists
& you: every road out of town.
Quick. Have these constellations changed
since you last taught their stories?
Surely not, but the riding mower
sounds like it could use
more oil.
This poem is my way of saying I recognize
we are the same & you
don’t have to do this alone.
Maybe you will never be forgiven.
Maybe I
won’t either. If you imagine how days
keep running until they don’t, maybe
try running too. Wounds can be
another way of cleansing.
