The poems five poems below all concern David Jordan's daughter, Dawn Jordan, who died in 1982 when a drunk crashed his pickup truck into her uncle’s car, in which she was a passenger.  She was seventeen.  The poems are presented in sequence, the first making reference to her toddlerhood and the last dealing with an occurrence years after her death.

What Silence Says

We tied bells
to her baby shoes
so she jingled
when she walked.
From the kitchen
we could hear her
as she careened
down the hall
on some busy, solemn
errand.  Only when
the jingling
stopped did we need
to run and check,
see what silence said.

When she
was seventeen,
her bells fell silent
forever.

I enter a grocery store
and see a tiny girl
with bells on her shoes
and it yanks me
back to a time when
jingling bells
told my heart
the child I loved was
on the move.
Alive.

The Temperature at Which

Daughter and Dad

For her twelfth birthday,
he gave his daughter
a basketball
and a blow-comb. She wrote
both on her gift wish
list, which revealed
much about who she was
at twelve. On the sixth-grade
basketball team, she fit
right in -- all long legs. At the same
time, she cared about
the curl and fluff of her
hair. She was a little
girl growing big.

Contradictory gifts, plus knowing
the next birthday would turn
her teenager, set him reflecting
on earlier years.  First
birthday, everyone who saw
the big brown eyes
and the belly that bulged
like a football hidden in
a tiny blue blouse said she looked
like Dad. At three, her problem
in life was Scotty, the boy
across the apartment house
hall. He bit. At five, she served
as Dad's companion, shared slow
days at home as he tried
to write and Mom clerked
at a bank. The Summer
of Peanut Butter and Skinned
Knees, Dad would one day
label it. At eight, she caught
chicken pox. Dad said
doctors called it chicken
pox because everyone
who got it sprouted feathers
from those little red
spots. He had her wide-eyed
with worry until he giggled. She socked
him. At ten, she had Dad visit
fourth grade. As they strolled
to school, she said: "Dad,
you should buy
some of that Grecian Formula
stuff I see on TV and rub it
on your mustache. Take
the gray away!" She
giggled. He socked her. Softly.
And then she was twelve, with
thirteen peeking around
the corner. Life was hard
to believe. Death
would prove even harder.

Post Mortem

We come to the funeral parlor,
I by myself, you with your good friend Liz.
We gather this day to speak of death,
our daughter's death at seventeen.

We talk of coffins -- wood or metal? -- and
of services and cemeteries. Graveside,
you say, nothing in a church. The one by
Pilot Butte, I say, where she can see fir trees
and mountains, not that sun-stunned field
on the north highway. And wood, we say.
She would want wood, not metal. She was a
natural girl, a girl of whispering woods
and mountain meadows, a skier, a hiker,
a camper. She should not sleep in metal.

Your eyes are red and your long, slim fingers
mangle tissue after tissue. Your lips are swollen.
Your blonde hair hides in an old-crone bun.
And we speak with John Robbins, the happy
mortician. I know him from Rotary. I asked
once how a man could make a career
of death yet maintain such cheer. “It’s a family
business," he told me. "My dad began
it. I grew up in it. It's what I do." He even
owns an airplane, has a pilot's license
so he can haul the dead to town for burial
from Boise and Elko, Spokane and Sacramento.

In our case, he suggests a hearse, since the trip
from Eugene is only a hundred and twenty
miles. Our daughter will ride home in a hearse.
But first we must answer the autopsy
question. The coroner has asked to do
an autopsy to establish cause of death. I see
my child lying in blinding light on a tray
of cold steel, long brown hair fanned behind
her pale face, a man in a green surgeon's frock
extending a scalpel to open her broken
chest. "No," I say. "For god's sake, no. A car wreck
killed her. What could an autopsy tell
them? She died of viral pneumonia?"
The mortician smiles. Gentle. Empathetic.
"Autopsies help if there's a trial," he says.
"If the other driver is charged with a crime."
He means well, yet I yearn to smash that smile.

You stare at the floor, twist your ragged
tissue. Liz lingers by the chair, squeezing
your shaking shoulder. How strange it is, to be
here in this dim room with the woman I
loved when I was young, her sad friend
and this smiling, nodding mortician. No
autopsy, I decide. My heart has been
carved out. They will not slice my child.

        

Princess

At dawn on a warm May morning you come back,
dancing princess
in a red polka-dot dress. You sway
to music,
tiny white shoes searching for rhythm. First transfixed,
captive to sound,
then coy and flirtatious. A white-lettered message
swirls at the hem
of your taffeta skirt: My Heart Belongs to Daddy.
I reach toward you,
expecting to touch nothing, expecting hands to slice
light and color,
emerge unfelt, but there you are. Warm, rubbery
girl-flesh,
ribs and elbows, long tan hair that tickles my wrists.
I lift you
with a palm under each arm, bring you into my lap,
hug you to my chest.
Your fingers clasp behind my neck, your heart-shaped
face presses
against my collarbone, I hold you tight. So solid,
so substantial,
so real -- crisp red dress, breast rising and falling
as you breathe,
smell of bath soap and raspberry jam.
I hold you
and hold you and hold you until light drains from day

and it is night. Bedtime. Deadline time. You begin
to age, to rise
to elongate. Seven years old, ten, thirteen,
then you are you
but still you rise, and now you are stretched, distorted.
"Sweetie?" I say,
and you answer: "I'm supposed to show how tall
I would have grown."
And back you settle into you, the girl I knew,
five-foot-three
at seventeen. "I have to go," you say as you
slip into bed.
"I know," I say. I kiss your forehead. You snuggle
under covers.
I pad out, switch off the light, close the door.
You are gone.
Dance this stage of sleep again, princess. Soon.