I was thinking of a daughter, therein the crush of a summerwhat can save her from. You know the one:that thick season from which she’ll feel everythingthat follows, follows. She isn’t wrongto get in the car with the older boy;in a sense she must,because she wants to. Headlong dive into the backseat.Headstrong is the wordher father uses before disappearingback to his office. For him, the one suffices.Not me: voluble as our girl, as I ever wasthough I have made a study of restraint,and practiced plenty,posed at the closed piano when no one’s home.Some nights when she’s returned to me, I for a secondthink: Changeling!Of course it’s her; it’s only thatas her resemblance to me—to a versionI can remember and recognize as self—grows,it gets harder to see hergrow, at once, ever more distinct from me.Further and clearer.Even as she repeats my errors:the selection of boy, my old white jacket with the fringe.And wears her seatbeltalways, because her mother made her.It’s not for her I wait up.In fact, she never comes.Still someone has to fill the loud freedomthat someone who must have been memust have chosen.