your eyes are green today
you still don’t look anything like your father

she tells me
on a chilly day in february
while we are playing fetch
with our dog

the first and only day
she met my father
he died in front of us
asking to go to the bathroom

    this is just a fact
    we carry with us
    a thing
    a coincidence

my eyes are brown
and my father’s eyes
were startlingly green
nestled still there underneath my sadness

there was nothing anyone could do then
just a million things we all could have done
over dozens of indistinct years
when we were doing almost anything else

that’s a poem i said
you can have it she smiled
like i ask permission i laughed
thinking about my lips on her chilled skin

we didn’t acknowledge this unspoken
the time she asked me the color of her eyes
lying in the dark together
and i said blue about her brown eyes

    this is just a fact
    we carry with us
    a thing
    a coincidence

—P.L. Thomas

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