When I was younger my father wouldn’t say I love you

very much, though I know this didn’t mean he didn’t. When he wanted

to say it, he would press his lips hard against my forehead and,

somehow, I knew it meant more than when a lover,

years later, told me he loved me in his one-room apartment

in Brooklyn. Speech can’t carry everything but God knows

I try to make it bear the weight. For example, if I were to have children,

I’d carry each I love you with a stubborn need, and yet, it’s me

who won’t call my father enough to tell him the same.

I’ve been hurt more by those who love me

than by those who don’t, and so I’ve known love exists

beyond words and in turn have tried to model it myself.

My grandmother, for instance, must have shown my father how to love

without saying very much, like the time she walked him into rehab

without raising her voice, without judging his actions,

and loved him, or the time my uncle passed out

and she carried him all the way to the hospital

to the final moment, in which she loved him. She loved him

all the way through the years after his body extinguished

and light entered him as it enters a cathedral, where she loved him.

And she loved me in the mornings with pancakes and cold coffee

without speaking, pressing her lips to my face, like my father

in the silence in which he loved me. And I learned then

I was too young for love, laughing at her strange kiss, proving myself

somehow worthier than the language of her touch, though I wasn’t,

though it’s how, I think, I learned to love: taking her hand,

scratching her back, learning word by wordless word.