Today's poem is by Caitlin Cowan

My Father Drives to Muskegon with a Bouquet of Flowers
       

only to be refused by his only child.
That hard summer sparkled
darkly: sweat at the small of his back
as he sped northwest. On the three-hour
drive he wondered would the mums
hold in the heat and did I know
they were my birth flower—the languages

we learn before going somewhere new.
I sawed through the summer
on the cheap violin he'd bought.
It was the year I turned fifteen, long
after he stopped coming home, had left
only spare change in his night-
stand drawer. On the last day
of camp he arrived in secret, slunk
into a rain-worn bench in the back.
Though the air hung heavy

between the lodgepole pines that flanked
the concert shell the conductor
took his time, explained the word aleatoric:
chaos and freedom, left up to chance—
my father could not imagine me
swimming in that confusion, and yet
I had: own echo, self-sonar, deft
as the bats that haloed our woodland chapel
that season and every season since.
The symphony was called

And God Created Great Whales.
My father remembered his own eyes
drying over the Old Testament as a boy
while he listened, remembered God
sometimes made lovely things
that we were not made to know.
He could feel my concentration—
a leviathan's shadow passing
over him like a cloud—but could only
count the minutes until it was over:
crescendo, whale song, tremolo.
After, in the sea of shrill parents

he searched for my face which
is also his face and found me.
A circle of young girls closed
around me, a pearl. And who
was he to prise open that craggy
shell, he who made a grown-up
of me so young, who couldn't love
my mother but ached
to hold my blonde locks
in his fingers, still. For years

my only inheritance
will be the comparison lobbed
in anger: arrogant, just like him.
Though I will not see my father
again, I will look for him in other
men, will let his absence flood me
like cold water. For now, the matter
at hand: where to shelve his mind
for the drive back down, how to rid
his brain of the zebra mussel shells
that sliced the soles of his every thought—
what to do with the flowers, the million
eager hands of its petals reaching
far enough to find nothing to hold.

Copyright © 2025 Caitlin Cowan All rights reserved
from Happy Everything
Cornerstone Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission