Ordinarily, I don't write poems. I write fiction, which, when I can get it published, has received wonderful reviews. Sales remain minimal. But that's what I do. 

This year, I wrote sonnet for my father, who was turning 85. I couldn't think what else to give him. I started writing it in January. His birthday was March 29. 

On March 15, he fell and suffered a concussion with "a slow brain bleed." By my birthday, April 5, he could no longer swallow. I flew to Idaho and helped my mother follow his directive for no intervention. We sat with him while he died, free of any fluids, nutrients, or antibiotics. To say it was harrowing is not an exaggeration. He died April 13.  My mother married him when she was 17. She's baffled and distracted now and I'm going to spend the next 6 weeks with her. For her birthday, I attempted a villanelle. I hadn't planned on it, but two lines between my own daughter and me when she received her masters in statistics last summer kept running through my head. The first two lines of the villanelle are what we said to each other. I wrote it in two days, crying most of the time. While composing it, another element arose. Nearly 30 years ago, my youngest sister, who was eight, was killed by a drunk driver. 

When I said Life is long, my daughter said,

That she had heard it's short, so which is it?

In truth, I said, our Life has hard, fast limits.

This puzzle will prevail in heads

And hearts until the day it's finished.

When I said Life is long, my daughter said, 

Perhaps lifespan relieves annoying dread,

Unlike the instant end--torture, isn't it? 

In truth, I said, our Life has hard, fast limits.

But if you suffer shocking loss within it,

Oh yes, it tears, it rips, and never quits.

When I said Life is long, my daughter said, 

Who measures Life in any given minute--

No one. All time enforces awful exits.

In truth, I said, our Life has hard, fast limits.

Enjoy the moment! Love exists ahead:

Surprise! A birthday party, candles lit!

Hurray for  you--and Dad--beyond all limit! 

I knew not to ask, “What’s that, Peter?” when he brought home the first wooden board. We weren’t that casual. Our conversations concerned the world and its needs, global hardship, destruction, and greed. And then, too, history, genius, and fundamental, universal truth—nothing personal.

To an astonishing degree, Peter found navel-gazing repellent. “I, me, mine,” he said.

When we met, I attempted to argue: People need to talk about their likes and dislikes; it’s how we relate.

But he said, no, it only leads people to demand that everyone believe what they believe.

Well, all right; I went along. After all, Peter was the most intelligent, handsome man I’d ever met.

Averse to anyone creeping or worming around for validation, Peter disliked revealing his inner life to me or anyone else. Initially, his secretive nature thrilled me—such depth and intrigue.

When we married, we made “non-intervention” our first vow. We would respect our  differences just as we respected other cultures.

This apartment has one bedroom, a tiny kitchen and tinier bathroom but high ceilings and thick brick walls. Behind the bedroom is a long, narrow, high area, set up as a closet, one half Peter's, one mine.

Once, when he scolded me for examining his toy soldier collection, I said, “No worries, darling, if you need to be furtive.” It was, I thought, just another guy thing.

But his voice was harsh when he said, “I’m never furtive, Angela.”

Of course, Peter wasn’t furtive--I hadn't meant it like that--but should he ever wish for a furtive moment, I understood. I understood, too, not to question his privacy.

The stockpile of wood and carpenter nails accruing in his closet’s shadows meant nothing. I imagined it was like a musty, secret shrine.

As his project developed, however, I worried. Turned out, it was a boy’s fort, secured to the closet ceiling. I surmised but never saw that he shimmied up a rope and pushed open the fort’s trap door.

Our confines were such that I registered without actually watching him horde bottled water, batteries, flares, flotation devices. He acquired a Boy Scout uniform and soon spent—it seemed—his life inside his fort. His troops traded intelligence in muffled voices.

And then, several times he refused to decamp for dinner. This battalion or that, I gathered, had been bombed to smithereens.

Well, please. This isn’t how I’d envisioned married life.

Yet since I was married, I tried to remain loyal.

Soon he wouldn’t come to bed due to military conflicts. He continued going to work, though. Until the holidays, when insurrections proliferated.

Since then, I’ve been staying at my brother’s and avoiding our landlord’s summons. I can’t run forever, obviously. My coworkers won’t cover for me another minute.

To be honest, I’m afraid here, ready with my door key, the hallway thick with silence and desolation.

For my father's birthday, I wrote him poems, although I'm not a poet. I write novels and serial fiction. This year I wrote him a sonnet based on my earliest memory. When my sister and I were in our cribs for the night, my father read us bedtime poems from his Notre Dame college anthology. My earliest memory is him reading "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins to coax us to sleep. My actual memory is the first line, "Glory be to God for dappled things." I used to hear those words playing in the sandbox. I heard them riding my bicycle leaf-shadowed streets. All my life I've heard that line every few weeks or months. While writing the sonnet, though, I noticed that I always heard the line in his voice when he was a young father, half-way through law school. Several times I told my father this was my earliest memory, but he didn't remember it or the poem.

His birthday was March 29th. This year, a week earlier, he fell and suffered a concussion. A busy emergency room sent him home. Two days later, he was admitted with a "slow brain bleed." A week later I joined my mother at a rehab center where he tried so hard to swallow, his neck seized up. I lent my support while my mother went through the process of following his medical directive--no IVs or any other artificial means to extend physical life.  In the days before he died, my mother read the sonnet to him. Once, I read it to him. Had I written it for Christmas, he would have parsed it carefully and debated whether any deviations in the meter added interest or not. Yet while I was with him, he and I shared phases of appreciation and reconciliation. He had always conceded I wrote well, but disapproved of my so-call "work," being something that provided no financial reward, and in my case, not even a flickering of recognition.  Yet at the end, we agreed any two-year-old who loves and repeats throughout her life "Glory be to God for dappled things," may not have had been suited to anything else. Here then is the sonnet:

Before The Little Match Girl gladly dies,

Before The Brothers Grimm, bed time meant poems;

Then Notre Dame invoked quatrains and sighs,

Divine as prayers received at heaven’s throne.

And still I hear your voice, buoyant and clear,

In “Pied Beauty,” Glory Be, Dappled Things,

Imagine, father, all we must revere,

Possessing every blessing true Faith brings.

If infants could embrace the Holy Word,

Too young to know what they can never know,

How seldom then would life appear absurd.

No way would I attempt immortal prose;

Instead, each tale untold I can’t resist.

Against all odds, I strive and never win.

Forlorn, estranged, in truth, I will persist.

If you rewind, you’ll see my joy begin!

Recall how hard against the wind we’d run

Becoming, you and I, wild boundless fun.

John was a cash-only antiques dealer in Chicago. Everything he sold once belonged to the  rich, famous, and scandalous. His side business salvaged architectural remnants and sold them to contractors. Another all-cash scam. His crews stole stained glass windows and glazed tiles at night and unloaded them at daybreak.

In a bar tricked up like a church, I convinced him I was better than his current bookkeeper. “Look,” I said when he was blind drunk. “Look at my face. Trustworthy as faces get.”

My timing must have been right. In three years I skimmed three million. With John’s drinking problem, I could have grabbed six, but greediness killed the cat.

Then I drove cross-country and bought a Victorian mansion in Yonkers.

Months later, I’m still sniffing around for an occupation. Three mil ain't what it used to be. Besides, I'm bored. But everybody’s already set. No need to talk. And my trustworthy looks? Not even women respond.

So I hire Natalie off the internet, and leave a fat envelope on the armoire. Same girl twice a week, so after a few months, I don’t mind asking her, “What gives?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why am I still paying for it and why can’t I find a nice situation?”

“Guess the market for embezzlers has just dried up,” Natalie says.

“Listen up, Sherlock, who says I’m an embezzler?”

“Who says I’m a whore?”

“Very funny.” Before I get angry, she says there’s a party down the street--my kind of party--and tells me to wear clean jeans and a good shirt if I have one.

Meanwhile, she washes her face, twists her hair on top of her head, and pulls flat shoes from her purse. Her skirt’s three inches longer than usual and she buttons up a little checked jacket.

Walking to the party, I ask Natalie if this is the same guy who gives piano lessons. 'Cause I've seen his flyer at the liquor store. 

 A little girl opens the door. “Hi Natalie.” My whore teaches the girl ballet. Also, the piano teacher deals drugs.

Natalie introduces me to people in real estate, car dealership owners, tax lawyers, supervisors, and consultants. 

After we shake hands and move on, she tells me how they really make their living, what their con is.

A man wearing a tuxedo extends a platter of stuffed mushrooms. Natalie eats three. I’m not hungry. She asks the bartender for bourbon, straight. 

“What’ll you have?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Loosen up,” Natalie says. "The Embezzlers Club is outside, on the deck.”

“Very funny.”

“They don’t call it The Embezzlers Club, but everybody knows. Do you want to land a ‘nice situation’ or not?”

“You’re kidding. Like, if I wander outside, I can meet people who'll hook me up with a sweet deal?"

Her shoulders lift, her head nods.

"And I suppose, I never get caught.”

“Not for a long, long time. Of course, someday you will. We all will, soon or later.”