A tree falls in the forest; you hear it. 
The world doesn’t stop — pauses but moves on. 
You stop and tap the face of your father’s watch.

That was a man who knew how to fell a tree.
Where to cut, when to push, how to step aside.
A tree falls in a grove close by. You hear it strike. 

The watch has stopped. Your father is gone.
You are falling yourself, failing where he cut you.
You can’t help it. You tap the face of his broken watch.

Time moves; the watch does not.
You’ve been broken forever and have finally snapped.
A tree falls in the yard. You hear it. You are it.

The day moves forward and you do not.
The house where you grew up has lost power.
You’ve fallen in the clearing and hear nothing now
but the ghostly ticking of your father’s watch. 

“Hi, kids,”

is how I greet the cats
this morning
while threading my way
between their passive-
aggressive body thrusts
against my legs as I 
try to get to the bathroom
before feeding them, my priorities
not focused on their needs
right now, leading them
to decide I must be
shrooming or something
to be so out of touch
with the nature of reality as to put
my urgent need before theirs.

By which I mean to say
that I do not subscribe 
to the notion that pets are kids
for all of us childless people
of the world, and that I am glad
these two
are direct and gentle enough
in their opinion of me
not to force the point so far
as to carve me with their claws
or make me trip and fall
until I cave in and feed them
before I can get to where I need to go,
later to crumble in shame and fury
simply because I must put myself first at times,
and I am forced again and again
to understand that is not allowed.

It tells me that I did not absorb
all the lessons of my family
and transfer them to how I love
these two. 

The first thing I see this morning:
photo of a graveyard.

Two stones stand out
more clearly than the others. On one,

the word “Berry.”
On the other, “Father.” I tell myself

it’s a portent of how
the day will go, that this is how

today is going to be:
random messages, written in stone,

any meaning to be drawn forth
by the viewer who right now

is seeing one sweet word,
one less so, and nodding his head.

When she says
“come home sooner rather than later”
it means “come at your own convenience
but do not forget
to take mine into account
as you decide
what that is.”

When she says
“do you understand, or do you?”
it means “whether you do or do not
understand, there is no way
you will wriggle out
of behaving as if you do
whether or not you ever do.”

When she says
“I guess she’s pretty enough”
it means “she’s lovely, but
I don’t like
your attraction
to her.”

When she says
“it doesn’t matter to me”
it means
it does. 

When she says
“you can do what you like”
it means “what you like
will likely be
the death of all your doing.”

When she says nothing
it is a filibuster.