I was thinking of a daughter, there
in the crush of a summer
what can save her from. You know the one:
that thick season from which she’ll feel everything
that follows, follows. She isn’t wrong
to get in the car with the older boy;
in a sense she must,
because she wants to. Headlong dive into the backseat.
Headstrong is the word
her father uses before disappearing
back to his office. For him, the one suffices.
Not me: voluble as our girl, as I ever was
though I have made a study of restraint,
and practiced plenty,
posed at the closed piano when no one’s home.
Some nights when she’s returned to me, I for a second
think: Changeling!
Of course it’s her; it’s only that
as her resemblance to me—to a version
I can remember and recognize as self—grows
it gets harder to see her
grow, at once, ever more distinct from me.
Further and clearer.
Even as she repeats my errors:
the selection of boy, my old white jacket with the fringe.
And wears her seatbelt
always, because her mother made her.
It’s not for her I wait up.
In fact, she never comes.
Still someone has to fill the loud freedom
that someone who must have been me
must have chosen.