I love these poems for probing at the entwined realities of time passing and change—things that I am tempted to turn away from. I did not have the chance to see my father grow older, but after reading “My Father Asks Me to Write a Poem,” I can imagine what it might have been like. Thank you, Katie, for these poems, which I will be adding to my mental anthology of the many facets of life illustrated so well for me by poetry.   

—Alison Pelegrin 

View  

Sixty caught up with my mother in Italy,  

one day in Florence. As if in some dreamworld

Dali’d invented, I caught her reflection gone

watery, void of its shape in a window.  

Really, the problem was I hadn’t looked at her

square in the face in a decade without   

all the filters of love, all the lenses that daughters,

  in worship, forget to remove for their mothers.  

“Go by yourself,” she insisted and shoo’d me 

to climb the Duomo and take in the view  

from its roof. “But what if we never come back here?” 

I countered. “You’d die without seeing it?”  

Four hundred sixty-three grueling steps later and three

breaks for breathing, I took in the Florentine

landscape and wondered if this was the first thing

that I’d ever done without her going first.  

I couldn’t see her from that elevation   

but pictured her anyway, sitting by strangers 

on one of the benches and pondering   

all of the things I would see all alone in my life. 

My Father Asks Me to Write a Poem  

It is near the end of my father’s life,

his memories like old neighbors  

who drop in and stay a spell,  

picking up where they left off,

then careful not to overstay, are out the door.  

It is a good day, and we idle on the lake.

Maybe because he knows  

there is not much time, he has given up

asking, “Why don’t you go to law school?”

or, “When will you write something that

will make you some money?”  

Now, when he touches me, he does it for a

long time, trembling. The waves rock us as

the sunset fires up the horizon.  He does not

need to say, “This is beautiful.” He does not

need to say, “I am grateful you had a child

in time for me to see him.”  

He does not need to tell me he is afraid. He

only says, “Maybe you could write a poem

about this moment,” and finally, near the end

of his life, he is glad I know how. 

Katie Bickham is the author of two books of poetry: Mouths Open to Name Her (LSU Press 2019) and The Belle Mar (Pleiades 2015). Her poems have won the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, and the New Millennium Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Frontier, Radar, and elsewhere. Katie teaches creative writing at Louisiana Tech University. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana with her husband, son, and short-legged shelter dog.