I had the chills as soon as I started reading this devastating Tiana Clark poem from her collection, Equilibrium.
“A Blue Note for Father’s Day”
Because I don’t know where you are–
I send you a letter of tree leaves
I heard this morning harmonizing
like emerald waves above a pond.
I send you John Coltrane,
who locked himself in a room of amethyst
for days with no food or mercy to write
A Love Supreme
We destroy ourselves for splendor–
emerging from the buried deep
like cicada song to mate & disappear again.
Today, I will not be bitter
about this holiday or the Facebook posts.
No, today I send you a roofless church,
a grotto with fuzzy moss & trickling water
that sounds like wet piano keys.
Please know–I’ve made good with my life.
With or without you, I know how to kneel
before imperfect men. I know this pond can carry
cold morning skin like blue blue notes
pressed from warm saxophone buttons for:
Acknowledgment, Resolutions, Pursuance, & Psalm.
Dear father, I hope you know that I can love
the absence of a thing even more than
the thing itself. That I can have one day a year
that doesn’t beat like the rest.
& friends, don’t ever wish to be me.
You don’t want this sunless song.
There is no number in my phone to call
There is no home with his face I remember,
just a place called Nowhere & this is where
I find & lose him like a savior.
live in the layers 