I Find Myself In Boston

I swore I would not write a poem for my father, who hated poetry and poets and most things, as though it would dishonor him— his bookish daughter who cried too easily; who sat silently through dinner; who slipped quietly from rooms as he entered, still thinking she was better than him. Fifteen years later, I find myself in Boston, rattling through cool tunnels below the city of my birth. I think I see him— younger than he could have ever been; but still, the white t-shirt, the thin mouth, the blue eyes that I did not inherit— and what disturbs me the most is not that I have just seen my dead father step out of a train into the cool white, the great big; it's that my first thought was I hope he doesn't see me. So I am trying to love him, and I am writing a poem for my father who smelled like cigarettes and soap and sawdust and raised five girls on a quarryman's pay, and I am crying, but it feels different this time.