This is the poem I always wanted to write
About trees and precipices and the Pacific
Coast in the state of Oregon, about mom
Who loved dad who passed away when it
Was too early to know what fatherhood is,
About how the individual doesn’t exist,
Luis, whoever he is, you, whoever you are,
It would be easier to dream our faces away

This is the poem I always wanted to write
About trees and precipices, a preference I
Picked up along the coast of Oregon, the
State that supported my two feet Monday
As I walked the face of a jagged mountain,
Hairy with pine, precipitous, and wind
Lashed paths led me to where the Pacific
Cleaves land, a lover pressed to her lover

This is the poem I always wanted to write
About mom who’s my precipice, she’s made
Of industry and resilience the way she works
At early light spoon feeding residents at the
Memory care facility she’s worked in for
Over fifteen years now and earned close to
Nothing, who still managed a house, bought
The way my love was bought with patience

This is the poem I always wanted to write
About dad, of whom mom tells me stories,
How he had many victories and failures:
A chief victory among his failures is that
When he was thirteen he took off for the
States, tied himself to safety rails of a train
With his belt to avoid falling off in sleep
As he clung to the side of the noisy freight
In a desert that grows icy at night: Dad
Struggled to keep his eyes open as the stars
Wove laurels over a future he had dreamed
Himself into and would now make a reality

This is the poem I always wanted to write
About how Ros pulled up to where I sat
With Sof on a grassy embankment toward
Dusk, then, after a bit of friendly talk, like,
Hey, I liked your poem, we got to discussing
How our philosophy denied the individual,
Because to be a single person simply doesn’t
Fly when Time blows us away in sleep and
We wake to mirrors that frame a different
Person, the hollow total of our pronouns,
And I’m not who I was when I wrote this

Photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash