The Vagabond's Daughter
It wasn't I who wept when you skipped out on us.
It wasn't I who called you names. My eyes
were steady on the waterline, were dry
and smiling at the smoke-blue clouds.
I knew all along your pirate-fate, your peddlar-quest.
I grew to girlhood on the prow of that small boat
which mostly - in the quiet times - knew earth's solidity
within the garden-shed's black Irish domesticity -
but sometimes, in the afternoons, sought islands
on a glass lake as your oar disturbed the surface.
I learned early - long before
my mouth fumbled on syllables, before I knew
the secret formulas for lavender and green, before
my fat fist and a crayon learned to carve
a name against your sketchbook's empty page. You painted it
in the tangle of spotted lilies over my cradle, buzzing
with dragonflies, dragonflies. Everything you made was winged:
the stenciled bluebirds
in their dizzy journey across my white wall. The cranes.
The white bird in its cage, the red claws
curling round the bar. And the monstrous dragonflies
green, twisted enormously from paper, painted.
I was an island.
I was a rest-stop - and when the wind changed -
or perhaps the light paled, or the trees burst
into leaf - then I woke to a small thunder, to a flurry of bright feathers.
I nodded, left my bower, noticed
everything. In your wake: birds, flowers.
And the patterns, the deep footprints, the great
story of the art of leaving.
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