Fathers’ Day

It’s been a year since you’ve been gone
and I don’t know what I should feel.
It’s possible I never will. You shone
a complicated light, and spun a wheel
of shifting coloured thoughts. When asked
if I miss you I had to think. I do,
of course, in certain ways. Though tasked
with memory, to mind is called the loo
in which you put your hands around
my throat, above a running bath
when I was fourteen years of age. The sound
of running water still a keystone on the path.

But then I think of running to your arms
when I was nine, of being told that you’d
waited for me and almost cried
when I was late from school, and all
the rest of it, the bad commingling with good.