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When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore

By Lynn Emanuel b. 1949 Lynn Emanuel

Tonight I will remember the model

With the wide, sad mouth

Who used to pose for father

Because I love the dangers of memory,

The boarded window and door,

Rooms where one bare bulb

Makes shadows swell up the wall.

And yet I recall only vaguely

The way her hem rustled on the floor

Like sand against tin

Laisse-moi tranquille, epicier,

It said because I want it to

Say something memorable.

I want her back

That brilliant, farfetched woman

Who drank coffee in our garden

And the days father fed me

Absinthe through a sugar cube

So I would be asleep by noon

And wake to find Ramona posing

Naked with a tambourine.

Tonight the whole world is a garden

In which the immortal whispers

Something about art

And its opportunities:

Memory like a bolt of silk

In a tailor’s arms

Can be made into anything

Especially misfortune,

Especially the year Ramona spent

In a wrath almost Biblical

And so far from the world

Not even the moon could find

Her study in Paris

Where the doors opened to the river.

Lynn Emanuel, “When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore” from Hotel Fiesta. Copyright © 1984, 1992, 1995 by Lynn Emanuel. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the University of Illinois Press.

Source: Poetry (May 1983).

Biography

Lynn Emanuel is the author of several volumes of poetry. She sees her Hotel Fiesta (1984), The Dig (1992), and Then, Suddenly— (1999) as a triptych exploring the convention and flexibility of the book, and the agency of readers and writers. As poet Eavan Boland notes, “Lynn Emanuel’s poems have a rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.”

The Dig received the National Poetry Series Award. Emanuel’s work has . . .

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