A Poem

Photograph
(Beth Kephart)

That was me before I knew myself
to be green-eyed and dissatisfied
with every sentence
I would not write. In my mother’s arms
with my father’s gaze upon me
and my brother in an ear-flap hat,
standing his ground. That was the house

with the sandbox backyard
and the streamered tricycles
and the piano my father sometimes played,
still smelling of heat and blaze, refinery
fires. The sky before us is behind us
and it is the way my mother holds me

that hurts me most, the way my father
already sees himself in his first daughter
and anticipates her unseasonable need
to smack her palm against the sun,
to run, self-glorified, to the sea
and mourn for dolphins there. Last night

it was much too cold to sit outside
and I sat, and the stars seemed upside down
and scolding, and a storm, it had been reported,
was on its way, but this was before that,
and it was cold, and I was wretched again
with the beauty I have joined and failed to keep.