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Posts Tagged ‘daughter’

One Gift from My Dad

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 14, 2025| Leave a Comment »

every time I giggle
though no one else can hear it
inside my laughter, your laughter

PLUS

Three Father’s Day Poems in Telluride Inside & Out
you can read them here. 

Wishing a Happy Father’s Day to all the dads❤️❤️❤️

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It Makes Me Want to Look Again, Again

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 7, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
It’s like living with the same painting
for years and then one day seeing in it
something I’ve never seen before,
that’s what it’s like tonight when we’re walking
along the river and I see my girl as someone new
emerging from the daughter I have known
her whole life. It is, perhaps, because the slant
of light is just right for such seeing—
the source of the shine coming not from the sun,
but directly from her, from within.

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For Now

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
Driving home from the movie,
our blood still charged with adrenaline,
my daughter and I move through
the dark just under the speed limit,
our eyes trained on the red taillights
in front of us, and we talk about plot holes
and how we would change the ending.
Neither of us would have chosen happily
ever after, which somehow felt false  
to the greater story. It’s not long before
we’re singing along to her favorite song.
I harmonize on the chorus, and
a “Peaceful Easy Feeling” grows in me
as we drive through pouring rain.
I may not believe in happily ever after,
but I do believe in content for now,
as in this moment when she reaches
for my hand and I slide mine into hers.
I can’t see her face in the dark, but
in her voice, I can hear it, her smile.

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Beauty Lesson

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 22, 2025| 9 Comments »


 
It used to embarrass me when my mother
would wear her bright palazzo pants printed
with enormous yellow and purple flowers,
red petals, blue petals—I mean every
single possible color of petal. And she
loved them. Flounced in them. Flowed
in them. Strutted and glided and felt
beautiful in them. I wanted to hide.
Now, when mom sends me pictures
of her dressed in bold patterns and sharp colors,
I delight in her delight. How strange
it would be for mom to slink
around in solid black and gray like me.
Laughable, even. My mother is audacious
in her taste. Now when I say, You look great, Mom,
I mean, You are a garden in full bloom.
I mean, You are exotic bird. A wild
kaleidoscope. I mean, I am still learning
how our differences are gifts. I mean,
Mom, you are beautiful.

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Right Now, Mid-Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 22, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
I am placing a bookmark on this page
in which my daughter and I drive
highways and turnpikes and green
curving backroads, singing
our way past tree farms and smoke
stacks, past sheep and cornfields,
grand estates and collapsed barn roofs,
this page on which, in every moment,
we are driving right up to the blank
edge where the story is still seeking
its setting and the narrator is still
seeking her voice and the page is
still seeking the fingers that will turn
it and those fingers are still so soft
as, with total trust, they hold my hand.

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Last Days

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 20, 2025| 4 Comments »




In the end, my father couldn’t
raise his arm to feed himself.
Couldn’t sit. Could barely open
his eyes. But damn, could he love.
He could still curl his thick
fingers around my hand.
Could still say my name.
And though I had never known
a moment when I was not sure
this man loved me, in those last days
I knew it more. Somehow, barely
able to speak, he drenched me
in his devotion. In those last days,
all was reduced to love. Or was it
all was expanded to love? Either
way. Somehow I hadn’t known
how love can take over a body.
A life. The purity of it. The gift.

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One Unframeable

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 17, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
in a room of priceless art
I keep turning toward
my daughter’s smile

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Not The End

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
A girl is curled into her mother.
The sun has long since gone down.
The night is warm and the room
is lit by a single orange globe
hung above the easy chair.
The girl could not be any closer—
even her ears are curled in
to the voice of her mother.
And if there is a world beyond
the chair in which they sit
and the book they read,
they are not aware of it.
Their imaginations are swirled
together into a world of talking
badgers and valiant mice and
betrayal and war and love.
Fifty years later, that girl
sometimes catches herself staring
in a mirror, stunned by a gratefulness
so deep for her own almost magical story,
a story in which for years she could sit
on her mother’s lap, rapt in a book,
both of them agreeing, just one more page,
and then, just one more.

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Still Learning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 7, 2025| 12 Comments »


 
 
Dad used to love to say of strangers,
We went to different schools together.
He always did love the silly, the goofy,
the nonsensical, the absurd.
Loved making funny noises,
like the time he sent me a cassette
while I was living in Finland. He
squealed high into the recording, saying,
Have you ever heard the sound a sock makes?
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I learned from him to narrate the world through sound.
I, too, might find a noise for setting down a plate
or pulling up a window blind, or tugging a weed
or dropping seeds into the ground.
I, too, have heard myself say of a stranger,
Oh yes, we went to different schools together.
And though I’m the one speaking,
it’s Dad’s voice I hear. His hee hee hee
when I’m giggling, laughing till tears spill free.
His squeal when I pull on a sock.
And I don’t pretend to know how it works,
but I believe we are, even now, somehow
in different schools together—me in the school
of life, him in the school of death.
I don’t know what he is learning, but I
am still learning how to love what is
and what isn’t here, how to show up,
how to listen to and interpret
the secret sound of a thing.

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And It Is

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 23, 2025| 10 Comments »

 
When you were small
I watched you dance
on the sidewalk, your arms
raised high as if inviting
the world to meet you,
rain and sun and all.
I watched you dance
in the living room draped
in hand-me-down dresses
and colorful scarves,
watched you dance
in small windowless rooms.  
Now you dance on the big stage,
floating in on pointe shoes,
your hair in a perfect bun
you pin up by yourself.
I wonder if every other mother
sitting in the dark also forgets
every second of her life save this one,
this second when you raise
your arm with such grace,
this second when your effortless smile
sweeps across the crowd,
this second when you are so shiningly
yourself, a radiant being dancing
for the love of it, as if this is
the only moment that matters.

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