No one knows the wet darkness
of our walks.
The Bay sliding into the night,
a blade of silver,
a universe with its astonished eyes
leaping by the thousands
from the waves.
I breathed the air with a terrified calm.
The shore, the jetty with its voices,
the water rippling like a black ribbon
against the moss and concrete.
And your stories, irrelevant, assuring,
as if my fear were a bad dream,
an isolated shadow,
a sprite in the trees,
something easily dispersed.
And I felt your fear.
How the rocks hid their dark shapes,
how a man died of innocence
in blank amazement.
How murder changed everything.
How Kelley’s Island held ghosts.
How the geese dropped from the sky,
and winter refused to listen
to the stories,
and the suicide that came later,
and you never told me
how love was washed to sea.
But my father,
I knew it!
The crevices of the night
told me your stories.
The different sounds,
the different voices.
I traced faces on the frosty mirrors
of the windows,
and that’s how our walks began,
before I took milk from a glass,
borrowed the red taste of a cherry,
smelled the dank beauty of rain.
I grew up in the soul of your memories,
heard the strum of a guitar,
watched the broken symmetry
of our Sandusky Bay
cradle us like crying children.