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Every year a poem appears to hint of my love for winter
… or lack thereof.

This year’s goes something like this…

Pilot flame lit, shivering
I loathe the click and hiss
of the metal box in the corner
for it calls farewell to summer

Fall days grow dimmer, shorter
skirts lengthen to pants
coats cover soft shoulders
ankles disappear into boots

Smiles and skin flee inward
huddle indoors for the winter
Only smokers left outside,
cussing, indifferent to the chill

Summer sprouted love, grew
then withered in autumn shadow
died in winter ice, leaving
no seed to greet the spring

The season of intimacy wanes
while others carefully cultivate
their love, I too wander indoors
to escape the chill, alone

Except for my kittens, who purr
happy for the warmth of my lap
and their love of that metal box that
clicks and hisses in the corner

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Despite how much hope and love you have for the people in your life, sometimes you just need a little closure, even from family.

Silence

Your time is up
A window of opportunity
Closes
Your silence begets

Silence
Five years I gave you
To decide
Am I human … or not

Patiently I watched you all
Dig your holes of hypocrisy
So deep
You can’t climb out

Traded sharp words
Knives in my back
Now you fear bleeding to death
To remove them

In family love is unconditional
Until you have to explain
Me to your friends
Sharing blood is not done in

Silence
Five years waiting for you
To make an effort to
Understand

Life continues on
One day you’ll wake to find
You wasted it being
Uncomfortable

With love to my mom, who has been quietly wonderful, but all too far away. Hugs!! ^.^

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Remember last month I wrote about a bridge my three-year-old self almost met my untimely end on? (See: Falling Off a Bridge Can Be Harmful to Your Health … and Other Lessons) I talked about how I felt my dad never really tried to connect with me. This is the rest of that story.

firewtowerBut first, a little note about fire towers. I’ve realized that some of you may not know what these are.

Way back in eras past, before cellphones–I know right?! There was a time before cellphones??–and none of those other satellites that could count how many Pringles were in the can you just ate . . . there were these towers in the wilderness, poking up above the treetops, where forest rangers would live and watch for wisps of smoke.

Sadly the satellites came along and put Smokey Bear out of a job, but many of the towers still remain . . . and you can rent them, to camp out in . . . way up there!!  Let me tell you: it’s awesome.

Here’s a little poem about something that happened in one of those towers somewhere in the wilderness of southern Oregon. It goes something like this . . .

I Never Cried

Seventy feet above mossy ground
a retired fire tower continues to watch
evergreen spires stretching to the horizon.

Ten feet for each year since my father
became an etched granite stone, as silent
as I remembered the man who rested beneath.

Camping in that glass box lightly swaying,
my companion paints a silver lining:
her father hunting for unfamiliar gentleness.

The words catch me off balance. I stumble
and fall from my safe perch, a waterfall
of memories, crashing to a distant ground.

My father snatching me from drowning.
My father steadying my first bicycle,
or unrolling a huge roll of plastic that became

A long soapy slide on a hot summer day.
My father’s boss offering me my first real job.
My father’s impish shit-eating grin.

Decades of blame, perceived neglect, eroding
in a river of memories, my only words:
“I never cried at my father’s funeral.”

Picturing my father, barely sixteen, driven
by puberty and his first crush, unaware
a family would be thrust upon him so young.

In a secluded tower, a country and a lifetime away,
darkness grows so complete that stars blaze
white in spaces I once thought empty.

And I knew he’d done his best.