Memorial for Miriam’s Dad (and Miriam)
by Sandy Feinstein
It wasn’t just the table she never told you about,
the origins of its deep scars,
slashes like medieval minims—
if only I could have explained it that way then
you might have forgiven us for playing
with knives on New Year’s Eve.
While others drank and smoked at Albanezi’s,
we made candles—light.
Our only prayer: please please don’t ever remove
the table cloth and pads while we’re alive.
“Do they know?” I’d ask regularly.
And maybe you did.
There’s more, too.
Your daughter was my first editor.
I bet you didn’t know that.
Not something she’d ever share.
So I get all the credit
she thinks you’d give me anyway.
It’s the old story you both know all too well.
Once again I’ve painted myself
into your cellar corner.
I hope you didn’t put her up to this—
“Can you think of something my father might have liked?
Something spare and smart, you know.”
Those poems I teach are centuries old—Christian,
not quite the thing.
Does she really mean,
“write a poem for my father, he’d like that”?
I wish I’d had the chance to say, “Wait!
Tell me what to say," in May,
when maybe words would form with spring
and spring and spring and spring.
Gyroscope Review !21