I met my father again in a video store by the creamery,
in a record store on my lunch break, in a museum whisper booth,
in Washington Square performing with a Beatles cover band,
and he said to me, Di, he said, you’re not what I expected,
like an online date who doesn’t think you measure up
to the photograph. I think he meant I turned out differently
than he imagined when I was three and I’d already learned
to read the newspaper. Di, he said, and I saw in his face,
well, what father would want me for a daughter? It was
as if God looked upon creation and wondered
at its atrocities. How, God thinks, could I
have fucked up so badly, but keeps it to himself.
Di, my father said, we were in the lamb barn of a county fair.
The lambs’ fleece was matted. They bleated piteously.
My father hadn’t aged a day, black hair combed into a wave
in the front you could lose yourself in. Children are known
to accept their parents’ hairstyles without question, no basis,
yet, to judge. I’m not sure he was glad to see me. To a dead man,
a living adult daughter must be such an overwhelm, a real load,
and from death he had learned to prefer simplicity, the ephemera
of steam rising from a cup, birds, but he didn’t care what kind
of birds. He was wearing a humble but clean shirt. He wanted,
I believe, to keep it that way. I was like a cake
with too many ingredients that had overflowed its pan, spilled
into the oven, and smoldered there. Di, he said.
I could tell he had a mint lozenge in his mouth.
One of those that winnows but never really goes away.
It wasn’t a sheep barn after all,
where we met up, it was a diner, and he did a spin
on his stool at the counter as if to entertain me, as fathers
are apt to do, or so I’ve been told. It’s too late for me
to be beautiful, I said, the ruin too vast,
for I assumed he wanted beauty. Don’t fathers
want beauty from their daughters? How ashamed
he was at my exploits. A nuanced man had lost, in death,
all nuance. In fact, the dead don’t love the living.
Like Jesus, they judge us.
Di, was all he said. Nice to see you.
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