Kathleen
Kirk
Prose Sonnet to
the Silent Father
1. I won’t know
what to say in my next letter, since you
have not answered the last and the one before.
2. I see you in every man who leans back in his chair,
quiet until he’s ready to push into a pause a statement
like, “That’s a terrible question,” about the one I just
asked.
3. My husband sat crying in his chair, I want to tell you,
while I sang in the other room and our daughter
screamed, “Stop singing!”
4. He cried for his own father, left behind in Cuba, who
played the piano.
5. “because he didn’t get to hear his papi sing,” my
daughter tells me later, “and he was still sad even with
me sitting on his lap.”
6. “Next time will you let me sing?”
7.
8. Here is a letter I have revised and torn to pieces,
an action you will call clichéd and sentimental.
9. You are like a poetry
teacher.
10. I need to learn how
to say the opposite of what I mean
but without irony.
11. (a prose tactic, yours).
12. I need to learn how
to leave silence at the center
13. and still be able
to sign my name to it
14. as if it were written
by me.
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