This week’s poem, Edward J. Rielly’s “My Father in Texas,” meditates on a small revelation about a parent’s life before he was a parent. I love how the speaker circles this single mystery in his understanding of his father, which grows more and more unsolvable, and the final two lines’ sudden turn back to the tangible and the known.

Rielly is a professor emeritus at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. He has written or edited over 30 books, including “Playing Solitaire” and “Learning to See.” He lives in Westbrook.

My Father in Texas
By Edward J. Rielly

I was told he went
to Texas once, my not-yet
father. A young man still
on his father’s farm, before
he married, had children, worked
hard at a farmer’s life, grew
old before he was old, died.

That Texas trip left no documentation,
no journals, letters, not even
a reason. I would have asked
him if I had known before
he died, but the trip surfaced
only later, in conversation with
an older cousin whose mother
was his sister, and who knew
at least the where if not the why.

Such a strange aberration in my
father’s very practical life.
My cousin had no reasons either
and, her mother dead, the answer
remains unearthed, a buried secret
in the fields that, year after year,
he plowed and planted.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “My Father in Texas” copyright ©2022 by Edward J. Rielly. Reprinted from Playing Solitaire: Poems (Moon Pie Press, 2022) by permission of the author.