One Way to Apologize to a Daughter for Careless Words
At Station Island, I am hungry for a beehive cell,
seeing purgatories under each mound and statue.
There is walking to be done, circuits of trying to fall
and catching myself over and over, a way of moving forward
I have practiced for years. At Station Island,
I am a penitent, which means I have sinned, but also means,
if I wish, that I have words to correct. The penitent
is the word that corrects the one used earlier.
I regret, for one, telling you, at the Wayside Diner,
that you don't belong. Here, I forgo speaking.
Fifteen hundred years of us coming here to apologize,
the air never warm enough, and if I had walked here
from the farm, I would have walked miles with no roads,
the reasons I have come as unchartable as yours
for the things you do. You walk the old man Walt around town,
reminding him of the world, and I come across it to go home
to this place, to say what words between us
could not accomplish. All over Ireland, there are rowboats
at lakes to bring the penitent to islands. The water here
promises drowning—guernseys knitted to know fishermen
washed ashore from the sea, but nothing like that for the lakes,
the families crossing together. There is no way to recognize
a family that has drowned. When we have had enough of land,
we cross water, glad for the lurching of it-our bodies glad
of the unsettling. How else am I to weigh all I've done?
I cross in some kind of silence, given the birds' and the oars' complaints.
I shouldn't tell you this, but I take my shoes off for you.
I remember how to love statues, the way they hold
their palms up, their shoulders back. I eat nothing.
Three days in, I say your name out loud.
Copyright Credit: Kerrin McCadden, "One Way to Apologize to a Daughter for Careless Words" from American Wake. Copyright © 2021 by Kerrin McCadden. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow / David R Godine, Publisher, Inc., www.godine.com.
Source: American Wake (Black Sparrow Press (Godine), 2021)