I’m trying to be through with things, to sign on / for the invisible.            
             —Kathleen Graber  

A new friend says our tears will water us deep. So I wave
another wand across the magic of my sadness  

and see what happens when we seek to grow
via drops of stubborn saline. My dad calls to check in.  

I’m a mystery he keeps trying to save. He says these
are the pains that never go away and sights  

instances of heartbreak fifty years distant. He says
sometimes the only way to move forward  

is to shelve it, so I imagine a familiar darkened corner
forever cluttered with our love. You once said  

you were keeping me locked in a barnacled room,
while I wrote us a reality that softened every keyhole.  

(It was never enough.) I write poems with a friend
who is deeply in love with her husband, but she still writes  

line after line of longing. She says on this shelf things decay
slowly and gifts me the line for a poem of my own.  

A poem that begins: night pinks the sky of another June
without you. I’m not yet sure what grows from this.