What was the name of that bar
where I kissed a blonde in a photobooth,
her husband just the other side
of the oilcloth curtain? Or the street
where our apartment sat above the train, soot
speckling the ceiling like a bad lung
we lived inside of? The letters we wrote then—
not love—but some bright threads like birds
might down their dull nests with. Now rain
on the roof of the barn, swallows back
after their long winter away, memory no more
than a season. Sometimes I long
for the kind of sadness inside of which
no one could ever touch me. In the snowmelt
puddles beside the barn we once found blood
pooled on the surface like oil, a thing held
deep inside, never meant to be brought up.
But I know what it would mean to choose
to return to the world after real loss—
to my heart with its broken tremolo, to this girl
on a horse, the reins in her still-soft
hands—because I do and I do and I do.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poetry: Beautiful in the Mouth, The Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms, which includes poems published in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is the editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline At My Daughter’s Riding Lesson.
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