April 20, 2013: To A Sad Daughter, Michael Ondaatje

To A Sad Daughter
Michael Ondaatje

 All night long the hockey pictures
 gaze down at you
 sleeping in your tracksuit.
 Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
 Threats of being traded
 cuts and wounds
 —all this pleases you.
 O my god! you say at breakfast
 reading the sports page over the Alpen
 as another player breaks his ankle
 or assaults the coach.

 When I thought of daughters
 I wasn’t expecting this
 but I like this more.
 I like all your faults
 even your purple moods
 when you retreat from everyone
 to sit in bed under a quilt.
 And when I say ‘like’
 I mean of course ‘love’
 but that embarrasses you.
 You who feel superior to black and white movies
 (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
 though you were moved
 by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

 One day I’ll come swimming
 beside your ship or someone will
 and if you hear the siren
 listen to it. For if you close your ears
 only nothing happens. You will never change.

 I don’t care if you risk
 your life to angry goalies
 creatures with webbed feet.
 You can enter their caves and castles
 their glass laboratories. Just
 don’t be fooled by anyone but yourself.

 This is the first lecture I’ve given you.
 You’re ‘sweet sixteen’ you said.
 I’d rather be your closest friend
 than your father. I’m not good at advice
 you know that, but ride
 the ceremonies
 until they grow dark.

 Sometimes you are so busy
 discovering your friends
 I ache with loss
 —but that is greed.
 And sometimes I’ve gone
 into my purple world
 and lost you.

 One afternoon I stepped
 into your room. You were sitting
 at the desk where I now write this.
 Forsythia outside the window
 and sun spilled over you
 like a thick yellow miracle
 as if another planet
 was coaxing you out of the house
 —all those possible worlds!—
 and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

 I cannot look at forsythia now
 without loss, or joy for you.
 You step delicately
 into the wild world
 and your real prize will be
 the frantic search.
 Want everything. If you break
 break going out not in.
 How you live your life I don’t care
 but I’ll sell my arms for you,
 hold your secrets forever.

 If I speak of death
 which you fear now, greatly,
 it is without answers.
 except that each
 one we know is
 in our blood.
 Don’t recall graves.
 Memory is permanent.
 Remember the afternoon’s
 yellow suburban annunciation.
 Your goalie
 in his frightening mask
 dreams perhaps
 of gentleness.

==

More parenting: A Little Tooth, Thomas Lux   |  Goodnight, Li-Young Lee

More hockey: February, Margaret Atwood

On this day in…

2011: Staying After, Linda Gregg
2010: Dream Song 14, John Berryman
2009: What We Kept, Megan Alpert
2008: Please Take Back the Sparrows, Suzanne Buffam
2007: It Happens Like This, James Tate
2006: Tantalus in May, Reginald Shepherd
2005: September Song, Geoffrey Hill