Rage

I've been thinking about my dad again lately, and my previous attempts at a poem like this. After several college creative writing courses, it's hard to break the habit of writing about bad shit in a precious way. I hate precious poems.

Rage

You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child's bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child's mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows--
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she's a tree
that will never come to leaf--
in your dreams she's a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments--
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

-Mary Oliver