My Poem for My Stepdaughter

             for Aja Sherrard at 20

The portent may itself be memory.
—Wallace Stevens

How hard to carry scores of adults on your back, 
not look at them as carrions of need, the distress 
of what loyalty requires. This pain is human, 
formed from plunges and positions,
misjudged from various heights.
 
For your love is of a practicalist tucked 
under purple quilts, sad conundrums, 
under the dearth of too much identity 
mixed with middle-class signifiers.
And then some from all other signifiers
like two magicians in someone else’s window.
 
How ceremony
for you was linked to desire, and not to a lie.
 
What you had is that writing came
from the same plumed pen as your father’s. 

And when you were writing we took note.

For so long the diary contained a seal depicting a wayward sense, 
descriptions for the sake of describing:
 
for what? for whom?
Now you’re growing—writing is skyward, a future tense.
 
There is a mountainous place. 
It’s where my crusty poetry lives,
and where my impulses reach across 
the divide to a charted, snowy place.
 
There is still bewilderment set between our conversations. 

Because we wanted you to mature.

Because you see it as our permanent discontent.

Nonetheless, we are close to the stitches 
where perfect boundaries darken us to you.
 
We hope willfully that we are close to the expiration of 
seemingly endless agitation.
 
Or we are in for years and years of 
its wild growth.
 
How encumbered-now memories existed
before the truth of a portent, which I have 
always taken to mean a warning.