More him than her, this portrait of my girl,
painted from memory by my discouraged father,
a uniform distortion, the nose too wide, the mouth
too grim, the eyes not far enough apart,
and missing most of all the bemused joy
that charmed me all her life, both of them
now dead—memory, death, memory, death,
what drives our thirst for love—
his talent wasted in the war, then in the mills
Until they closed, then in the shops, working
where he had to work to drive bright cars,
squandering his artist's touch for forty years,
until, at last, he uncased his brushes
and old oils, some still center-soft
in dark lead tubes, and tried as best he could
to paint again, the girl he never knew
but surely loved, and failed, his last attempt.
Salvaged from the sale following his suicide,
I kept it in a sack for forty years.
This spring, a decade since her presence stayed
beside me for awhile under the magnolias
outside Roosevelt Hospital, and I watched
her spirit rise through a shower of petals,
I hung it on the wall, an answer to myself
to keep on writing, I owe that much to her,
and know the fate, if not more me than him.
