When he left, I felt the slow unraveling
of relief, the same relief I’ve felt when
approaching the broken body of an animal
in the road, only to realize it is the husk
of a tire, a loss that does not require me
to mourn it. True, I lost my father,
but I had been losing him all my youth,
had learned to grow around the strange grief
of presence, of a father unmaking himself
while I watched. When he left, I’d aged
out of childhood, grown tired of kneeling
beside the dry riverbed each day to envy
the bleached stones, their smoothness
shaped by a water my hands had never
touched. His parting words to me were
through email. My response bounced
back, undelivered. In the blue glare
of the screen, I looked at my shame
and saw that it was his—that he had
given it to me, named it daughter.
When he left, I traveled to a grove
of giant sequoias, a place clean
and damp as my earliest memory,
to look into the hollow of a tree
carved by fire. When I placed
my hand on its body, the bark
was warm against my skin.