Poem for Gregory, age 8
If I told you, you would have understood:
I’m scared of it ending. This long summer, the constant fog
banks dismantling the shore. What is it
about fog that slants each shrouded moment
as if already in memory? How it makes each tree
not unfoliaged but unleaved. Something is always leaving
a place and thereby always arriving, also,
somewhere new. You ask questions the way I do
when I know there’s no easy answer and I’ve learned
that is brave. On pain, it’s difficult
to offer you half-truths but think about the way the world looks
in the early morning after a hard rain — a little bit
crumpled but mostly, shining. Remember all our quiet drives
back from the beach? Arms making waves
out the window, one last strip of light hovering
above the horizon like a nearly shut eye. That song
with your name in it playing, or the one you found
where the gravel-throated guy sings about not liking
the man that I am. Sometimes when you pause—
gaze fixed, hand mid-ripple—I think you must be learning
something new about yourself, then rewiring the connections
between motion and meaning. That’s when history pleats
like a paper fan and I’m not sure what is you
and what is part of who I used to be.
Those marker-tattoos you drew me
by now have washed off. I watched the water run
painted into the drain. The past should wash off
of us too but it won’t. It dyes the skin, permeates the pigment
so still most days it rubs like marker into cloth. But it’s not
like that, really. No, it’s not like that at all.
Madeline Miele grew up scrambling across Maine's rocky coast and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Stonecoast Review, Uppagus, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.