A Different Day’s Light

                   Patrick Carrington

 

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.

    

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