It’s a whirlwind season in my home life. Graduations, college preparation, combing through old pictures, casting off items we forget we had and certainly will never use again. Everyone is drifting – not in a bad way. But we are definitely coming un-stuck from each other. There is nothing to prepare you for this kind of pulling apart. Everything tastes bittersweet.
In the middle of all of this, I wrote a villanelle – about change, and love, and seeing the ones we love with new eyes. For my father, for Father’s Day.
Seventeen
Suddenly, he won’t talk to me:
He’s become a steel curtain.
It’s just the way I used to be
with my father, too, half angry,
half amused at the old cretin.
Suddenly, he won’t talk to me
about even simple things. We
are strangers more than next-of-kin.
It’s just the way I used to be –
I remember the agony
of this age – the man-trap he’s in.
Suddenly, he won’t talk to me
except on days he needs money,
and really, is that such a sin?
It’s just the way I used to be!
I don’t take it personally –
this is a game a dad can’t win.
Suddenly, he won’t talk to me –
it’s just the way I used to be.
Penguin Poems 