The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
— Roethke, ‘My Papa’s Waltz’
Where you found your perfect Scandinavian
fivestar dreamroom, only the bed
was inches short, & hard as the bed of a monk —
no place was a place to get straight in —
& the mini-bar had to be smuggled in
to ease your retreat, & the hosts themselves
teetotal, if this was your tropical
island you were stuck with me like a blank
book, where you wanted talk
& got my silence, dumbfounded I
took your pain regardless,
packed as a squash ball in a closed space.
‘Trace’, you said, but the sentences
never went where you intended, they
rebounded, & I was
a little girl again, watching the red
Celtic lines of my father’s
harried brow & neck, I am not big enough
to handle this, if I stay
long enough, mute witness, perhaps
it will pass. Mid-tears
you laughed & apologised, asked
if I knew that Hopkins wrote those hymns
we both grew up on.
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