A dog yaps in the alley, a train hoots through haze, 
thick, mournful, driving memories of a visit 
to my father’s house the first summer 
after my parents divorced, Amtrak digging south 
like a splinter. My father poured sweet tea, 
amber sap spooling sinewy over ice 
before he took me to see a counselor 
in whose strip-mall office I sketched a family 
portrait: father’s glasses, mother’s ponytail, 
my pink high-top sneakers fastened with a crayon bow. 
Most days I spent tightlipped in the treehouse
cradling a BB gun, toppling empty tin cans 
from a stump: kidney beans, corn. Each chimed 
a brief, high bell when pellets struck. 
Rolling on my back, I gave over to the tide 
of clouds, passenger on a plywood vessel of grief. 
Lightning cast down daggers. The neighbor girl 
climbed through speckled shadows, 
rising like a specter to sit with her back 
pressed against the trunk, gushing about boys. 
That was years before my first marriage, 
the man whose dark silences made me want 
to pry him open—years before I realized 
I preferred silence to men and started plying it 
with a pen, wanting to see what could be gleaned 
from memory: the tick that rode side-saddle 
on the dog’s back, a motorboat weeping rust 
in a corner of the yard. I wonder if the counselor 
missed it, peering at my picture, reading absence 
into white space. Something waited there. 
Something always waits, worrying the surface—
the gems and wreckage we cannot see our way 
to carrying until the smoke clears, the storm dies, 
the voice comes back. How my father sang kum ba yah
in his clear tenor, or my foot slipped once and sent me 
to earth, my teeth ringing in their sockets, toneless.