love and poetry on the short drive home

On the Isle of Elba she wrote verse to the mandolin

her teacher played at recess in her classroom

about the ports emptied of fishing boats, and love.

Then your father dabs at something on his cheek

turns down the demister fan but turns the heat to red

and the windscreen wipers speak in groans to the glass.

The way home is short but variable – turn down streets

from Bell to Separation and they’ll take you there

in similar time, only tonight that’s devastating

on this car ride half too cold and half like a furnace

on these tram tracks overexposed and slick with dew

because the radio isn’t on and the flossy winter fog

Encapsulates the two of you and it’s beautiful

and it’s so beautiful – you tell your dad he’s no different

to his mother, in the bloom of her girlhood in his memory

he tells you your own mother is selfless like this fog

and he raises his hands from the steering wheel and says

that if she were any more selfless, she’d disappear

You tell him he’s a poet too, without having penned a line

that a father’s tears are pure poetry, liquid poetry

that a father who cries for beauty is the only inheritance

worth a dime to you, worth everything

because everything else is an orphan in that cradle

because the truest poets are those who never write

And you idle outside your house for another two hours

talk about the latch on your front gate falling off

and the bareness of the trees and the swamping of the gutters

with caramel leaves that an old girlfriend would kick and throw

and whether your little brother ought to grow a ponytail –

when you make to get out, you lock hands and don't talk at all.