Daughtering

     When my parents found the bottle of gin
in my purse - a small darling the size
of a fat diamond - they couldn’t get mad.
They tried to. They pulled their eyebrows tightly
toward their nose, but they couldn’t decide
how to go about it. Should they scold me?
What could they say? Should they hit me? How hard?
They couldn’t weep, they had done nothing wrong.
Afterward,
as my mother warmly washes dishes
and my father kicks off his slippers,
I play Debussy on our piano with
passionate crescendos (she dabs her eyes),
and delicate ritards (he lets sleep set in) -
and again, we awkwardly divide.