American Wake by Kerrin McCadden

Author:Kerrin McCadden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

One Way to Apologize to a Daughter for Careless Words

At Station Island, I am hungry for a beehive cell,

seeing purgatories under each mound and statue.

There is walking to be done, circuits of trying to fall

and catching myself over and over, a way of moving forward

I have practiced for years. At Station Island,

I am a penitent, which means I have sinned, but also means,

if I wish, that I have words to correct. The penitent

is the word that corrects the one used earlier.

I regret, for one, telling you, at the Wayside Diner,

that you don’t belong. Here, I forgo speaking.

Fifteen hundred years of us coming here to apologize,

the air never warm enough, and if I had walked here

from the farm, I would have walked miles with no roads,

the reasons I have come as un-chartable as yours

for the things you do. You walk the old man Walt around town,

reminding him of the world, and I come across it to go home

to this place, to say what words between us

could not accomplish. All over Ireland, there are rowboats

at lakes to bring the penitent to islands. The water here

promises drowning—guernseys knitted to know fishermen

washed ashore from the sea, but nothing like that for the lakes,

the families crossing together. There is no way to recognize

a family that has drowned. When we have had enough of land,

we cross water, glad for the lurching of it—our bodies glad

of the unsettling. How else am I to weigh all I’ve done?

I cross in some kind of silence, given the birds’ and the oars’ complaints.

I shouldn’t tell you this, but I take my shoes off for you.

I remember how to love statues, the way they hold

their palms up, their shoulders back. I eat nothing.

Three days in, I say your name out loud.

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