I have soaked you in and I hold you,
like the wood of an old house
holds its carpenter’s sweat.
You built me
in the shadows of a different
day’s light, stained my
deepest grain. But I no longer feel
the work of your hands. Forgive
me for forgetting
the joinings,
the glue and pressing of thumbs,
for allowing your craft to rot
like salty wreckage spit
from a sea. I can’t find you
in me even as I creak, even
as I leak from windows
watching days I can’t unsee.
[This poem first appeared in Compass Rose]
Patrick Carrington is the author of Hard Blessings (MSR Publishing, 2008), Thirst (Codhill, 2007), and Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), and winner of New Delta Review’s 2008 Matt Clark Prize and Yemassee’s Pocataligo Contest in poetry. His poems are forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, West Branch, Redactions, The Spoon River Poetry Review, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing in New Jersey.