I Tell A New Lover About My Dead Father

He could light his pipe in a windstorm.

Why is this the first thing I say? But I can see him so clearly, my dad, with one hand on the tiller,
mouthpiece clamped between molars, right thumb swiping the match head against flint strip—
the spark, the blaze—his torso a fortress against lake breezes as he sucks the flame bowlward,
moist shreds crackling orange, smoke billowing before being whipped away. Ready about?

Why didn’t I tell him how frightened I was, though he never touched me.
How he never touched me?

In the introduction that never happens, my father holds forth from his red leather wing back,
interview-style. He knocks his pipe against the heavy green glass ashtray five, six, seven times—
a clanking halyard, a seagull caw above the whisper
of our presence.

Have you ever considered investing in silver?

I can guess what my new lover would say—something polite, vaguely deferential—but I hope he
hears the muffled longing, an invitation to a friendship, a desire for someone he can take out
sailing, talk S&P, WSJ, stability and volatility, the risks of investing in metal.

No matter how many poems I write about my dead father, this new lover will never understand
my sullen silences or sudden moods or the dread that haunts the father-shaped hole in me, how I
learned what I must do to keep the love of a man, why I now refuse to.