My daughter asks me to read her diary, and: Woman to Woman

My daughter asks me to read her diary

Because the breaking down begins so sweet,
and she writes, Did you let go of my father
or did he let go of me?,

I feel it all over again,

longing as such wasted travel.

One hundred miles North or South,
it doesn't matter,
even if I think I'm getting away,
I'm not;

the orchard still looks
like a whole sky of blossoms
falling,

and always I am there with him,
old sorrow
upstream of this quiet spill of creek.

So when she writes,
I will be your overwhelmed and drastic joy,
I wonder if she knows

these girls in the schoolyard
wild tails of hair already trembling,

a mare tethered
beneath the blooming plums,

a tractor rusting along the frontage road,

draw their very sweetness
from that moment he was giving her to me.
It might have once seemed harmless,

but it's not,
an imperceptible gathering of wind
that rubs and frays the bloom,

a merciless unfolding
that cannot stop,

this beauty that hinges us all to grief,
limb by fragrant limb.

Woman to Woman

And water another dark sky
she could enter, wholly,
her body undressed and flinching.
I knew she could stop herself, but why,
the warm hand of the sun along her neck
the undeniable furnace of every flat rock
she lay across. And watching her
at the beginning of love,
when the old sorrows are answered and
the questions coil back like mayflies
latched and nursing at the river's bottom,
I seemed to be there for the listening
and so I did, with a tender bruise
where my life might have been.
Strange, what moments scar you forever,
like turning from the river's pour
to see her standing in a patch of sun,
eyes closed, face uplifted.
When I was last in love,
I drove with every window down,
the kindness too enormous to keep,
and touch surging,
the way she lay me down last night and
rubbed my back with oil.
And so I walked with her to the payphone
for the third time that day, though by now,
the world was thick with dusk, the trucks
gunning louder up and down the canyon.
She held her lover's voice close as she could,
back to me, her head against the metal booth.
I felt old.
Turned my flashlight off
so the dark gleaming was all there was.
The salted nebula and wild, circled tracks.
Sky's vast forest heading deeper in.
So many lost and perfect stars.