His sins do you confess them?
No I keep them.
To some a peculiar matter
for wife
and husband, but
the summer I was sixteen
thirty-two years after
the summer my sister was sixteen
what to do when daughters
and fathers
for he was surely a different man then
live as equals? Words unbound
exchanging.
I know now how it was unfair
but at the same time–
he was never my hero,
always just another man
slowly sowing another garden
to make up for his paradise lost.
I keep my own secret garden,
and his too.
It made us closer.
(It made us the same person.)
But now I cannot tell apart bruised blooms
mine or my father’s
so I will keep these, too;
in the same small box
as his gold cufflinks, and that chip of gravel
from another life.
