Showing posts with label Fatherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fatherhood. Show all posts

Friday, August 11, 2023

MY DAUGHTER SPEAKS OF BIRDS

 

My daughter speaks of birds, speaks in wonder
of their sing-song call and response,
their endless reserve of resilience and guile
in the face of all manner of adversity,
the sudden and startling grace of their flight,
which, after all this time, continues to
amaze those of us standing
flat-footed on the earth below.
She asks which bird I might come back as
after I have departed from this life,
and how she will know it's me.
"Fly close to me three times," she suggests,
"then give out one call." This seems
a reasonable request, provided my new
bird-self can remember the details.
Our ancestors, after all, believed that
the soul was carried in, and away,
on the wings of the sielulintu,
that the whole of earth and sky were formed
from the broken shell of a fallen egg.
We settle, for now, upon a common jay,
brightly handsome but unassuming,
vigilant in watching over its family, never
straying far from its wooded home.
We have, I hope, the better part of this life
to draw our fragile maps,
perfect our signals, our language
of mutual understanding.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

SENSITIVE

 

I have never wanted for you, dearest daughter,
to be anything other than the beautiful and sensitive
soul you have always been, collecting oak seeds
to watch them spin back down to earth,
those long-stemmed dandelions bent over, as if in prayer,
deciphering the forms of strange new animals
among the clouds, where the ancestors sleep,
faces smiling back from the most ordinary of stone.
I have admired, as an outsider, the special language
you share with birds and trees, how the cats
in the neighborhood all come to you, unafraid,
knowing you already, and how you mourned deeply
the death of your beta fish, the one you called
your sister and confided your worries to.
I have heard you choosing each word for a poem
or song, tapping them against the roof
of your mouth, letting the new sounds settle,
until they filled your ears as perfectly as the silence,
watched you conduct, with arms gently waving,
a string concerto constructed in your mind;
and when bullies have thrown their sharpened words
like so many stones, I have sat within your sorrow,
unable to offer an answer as to why some, young
or old, simply enjoy the act of causing harm.
These are the times when I want nothing more than to
protect you from the inclement elements of self,
the ever-shifting atmosphere of your inner world
overwhelming you, to close, temporarily, the windows
against the sudden rain of summer, until the sun
again finds its way, small enough to tuck into
your pocket like a coin, thin and hot to the touch,
rubbed smooth at the center, reflecting.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

CARRYING MY DAUGHTER TO BED

 

My daughter, so proud lately of her lengthening limbs
and muscles, still asks, on most evenings,
to be carried to bed, which -- amazingly, though
with no small effort -- I am still able to do.
Long gone are the days of lifting her with ease,
as though moving one of my own limbs,
absentmindedly, up or down, gone now the special hold
I somehow stumbled upon when her wailing --
as if the entire anguish of the world had
been condensed into one elongated vowel --
simply could not be consoled, her small and fragile
body held out before me, head resting snugly
in the palm of my hand, her torso fitting perfectly
into my forearm, her flat and skinny feet,
not yet having touched upon earth
or grass, reaching out into the air, unafraid,
and we swayed that way, gently, almost imperceptibly,
upon the kitchen linoleum, until her cries
drifted slowly into coos and gurgles, and at last
into the welcome silence of sleep.
Tonight, I carry her down the narrow hallway,
turning sideways, and with little grace on my part,
dropping her into the soft familiarity of
bedsheets and blankets that bear her fragrance,
her shape still faintly visible from the night before,
where she will drift again into weightlessness,
her body building itself even when she
is seemingly gone, as the map behind her eyelids,
the one only she can read, draws her
forward, relentlessly forward.

Sunday, May 21, 2023

FINNISH PANCAKES

 

We stand at the kitchen counter,
my young daughter and I, mixing together
the milk, flour, sugar, and eggs by hand,
and per the family recipe, we do not measure
too closely, and are careful not to over-mix.
This recipe, handed down from her great-aunts,
and much further back than that,
is more feel than science, I am reminded,
not so different than writing a poem or falling in love.
In other words, it's always the first time.
When in doubt, add more butter,
always remember who you are cooking for,
and don't be afraid of small mistakes.
We can never resist peeking into the secret realm
of the oven as it browns and bubbles up
over the rim of the pan, as if from the earth
itself, lovely in its imperfection. Moments later,
lingonberries and maple syrup dripping
from our lips, we agree that this must be the best
batch yet -- until the next, and the next.
This is sustenance, after all, but also
a kind of song, a calling back to a world
long past, before setting out into the bright
expanse of this new day.

Friday, April 21, 2023

SECOND MEETING WITH MY FATHER

 

After burying my half-brother that afternoon, I asked the cab driver to drop me at my father's shop on Rice Street, two blocks up from the housing projects, where as a child I had so often imagined him, alternately captaining a ship through far-off lands, or swilling cheap wine under a bridge with the other derelicts. But here I was, surprising him, weighted and imbalanced with grief and a lifetime of questions which I could not bring myself to articulate, even now. He moved, at his ease, through rows of carpet and color samples, walls stacked with gallon drums of paint, back to his wood-paneled office. I noticed the pigmentation of his hands had receded, leaving patches the color of lard shining through, or the underside of a painting that has begun to chip. "Well..." he began, offhandedly, "you and I just kind of went our separate ways" -- as if this were an explanation, as if the child had somehow agreed and denied the father as well. He leaned back in his desk chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows pointed in either direction, asked what I did for a living. I told him that I was a poet, which he failed to acknowledge one way or another. "I mean," he tried again, "What do you do to put money in your pocket?" I shrugged, stammered out one dead-end job or another. It was hard to imagine this most plain-spoken of men ever sweeping my mother off of her feet, however briefly. But wounded people have a way of finding each other, and are privy to a language of their own. It was, in part, why I was here, a product of that wound. This, then, was the earthly kingdom he had constructed, and had chosen again and again. It was, I suppose, a life that he could understand, one of facts and figures, the tangible and the easily stated. I left him to it.

Sunday, April 2, 2023

COMFORTING THE CHILD

 

Being the only son of parents who
abandoned their children as easily as one
walks to the grocery store -- one
preferring the soft oblivion of Stoli and
sleeping pills, the other the peculiar balance of
status and anonymity that only money
affords, -- I stand, perhaps, too closely to
my own girl, always on guard,
hovering, worrying myself into sleeplessness.
I am nothing if not vigilant, an occasional
nuisance of concern, golden retriever of a father
at the gate, barely blinking, awaiting my cue.
When she races up the steps of her school,
confident in a way which I never was,
my pride mingles with a tinge of unspoken grief.
Still, I want nothing more than to be taken
for granted, to never be known as an absence.
I want for her the autonomy of knowing,
for love to be as constant and as easily forgotten
as the silent pulse of blood at wrist
and ankle, and my hand upon her shoulder
when she hurts, drawing circles
on her back, comforting, not only her
but the child no longer there.

Friday, March 31, 2023

ILLNESS DURING CHILDHOOD

 

When my daughter becomes sick with fever,
unable to keep even water down, I am taken back
suddenly to those terrible illnesses of childhood,
gathering like storms on the horizons of
our brows, all of us, heat blazing through temples
east and west. I remember the holy eucharist
of saltines and warm 7-Up, the pinpricks of pleurisy
through lungs gone weary with coughing,
throat scraped raw, red one day, spotted white
the next, giving up the ghost of speech;
remember, too, the little brown bottles of Robitussin,
the mountains of knotted tissue hardening,
the smell of sickness seeping into everything.
I am reminded of how we learned to walk
through sleep, as we had in waking life, pushing
hard in our delirium against heavy furniture
as though ships stubbornly clinging to shore,
while visions of saints and ancestors floated patiently
past our doors and windows, visitors which no one
would have believed had we mentioned them.
I remember how we became somehow weightless
and immovable at once, sleeping so hard
that no dream could have roused us, our limbs
growing limp and longer through the night,
reaching out for that mythical land of sunlight
and well being, until one morning we did
awake, bright eyed once more upon a shore
of cool linoleum, our bodies new and uncertain,
flat feet plodding from one room to the next,
so thirsty that we could have drank the rain clouds dry.

Friday, January 27, 2023

MAGIC

 

My daughter pulls a coin from behind my left ear,
turning it toward the afternoon light,
smiling almost imperceptibly, obviously
pleased with this trick she has observed
somewhere, and has perfected quietly on her own.
Others soon follow: an endless river
of brightly colored cloth spilling out from
her sleeve, my fortune told by
complicated folds and triangles of paper,
the choices seemingly endless.
I pick a card from an ordinary pack,
and after a few hesitant attempts, its match
at last makes itself known.
But it's how she grew as tall as the pocket
of my work shirt, when I had left
the room for what seemed a moment,
It's that she chose to be here with us at all,
first appearing as light, then sound,
then an inexhaustible bundle of questions.
For now we stick with the simpler tricks
from her dimestore handbook,
the severed thread put back together,
the handkerchief floating like a friendly ghost
above the round house of her hand.
And I need not feign surprise or wonder
as she works her way through each.
I am, I confess, in awe of it all.

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

CHANGING THE ENDING

 

How many of those old children's tales
have I found myself editing and adding to
while reading to my young daughter?
How many children were spared at the last from
becoming some cretin's favorite meal,
how many kindly animals saved from the axe?
What kind of mother sells her kids to the gypsies?
What kind of father could somehow be talked
into leaving his children alone in the woods,
hungry and terrified, with only the birds
and breadcrumbs to help lead them home?
Even poor Francis, that inquisitive and mischievous
badger, was threatened with a spanking
for failing to fall asleep on command, with me,
grudgingly, having to explain the meaning
of the word, so foreign was the idea in our home.
Things are very different in this telling of ours,
a world apart from that of her father's.
One day, perhaps, she may understand how
I somehow altered my own narrative, and
therefore hers, simply by being the father who
stayed, who chose to do so every moment.
Though there are still many days when I long
to change the story, if only by slowing it down,
pausing before the next turn of the page.
Every small moment has somehow become
my favorite, every adventure the greatest one yet.
I am only beginning to understand, dear reader,
and I confess, I never want this story to end.

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

FIRST GRADE

 

The autumn moved in seemingly overnight,
its gray and watery chill seeping through
the windows while we slept. Suddenly,
the glittering Ferris wheel of the State Fair
has stopped for yet another year,
the green of lawns and hills grows less certain,
the leaves already folding in on themselves
like small hands clutching at the air;
and we stand, my daughter, her mother,
and me, in the hallway of this new school,
the light strangely familiar, as though bottled
from decades past and just opened again.
Our daughter is smiling but nervous,
her suntanned arms at her sides as she turns
with uncertainty, chin held tightly against her chest,
as if trying to find a doorway into herself.
But she turns instead toward this classroom,
her backpack comically large, her bag of supplies
so heavy that she pulls it at her side;
and we, her parents, turn with the ringing
of the bell, so startling in its insistence,
to leave, as ever, in our separate directions.
But of course we, too, are being pulled
forward, together, into all that we could not
have planned, the beauty, the boredom,
and wonder of this great unknown.

Sunday, September 4, 2022

THE ANIMAL PHILOSOPHER

 

Walking with my young daughter to school,
she asks, seemingly out of nowhere,
"What are words anyway?
They don't mean anything, really.
What is a girl, or a tree, or the ocean?
To an animal, the words we use are just
sounds like any other sound."
And I, who have spent the better part
of a lifetime believing in the beauty
and possibility of language, of building these
small temples of measured sound,
can offer no reasonable defense against
such a pure distillation of truth.
Have I been exposed as a mere hack,
a mild mannered charlatan? I am strangely,
secretly wounded when she throws
out the question of ages: "Why are we here?
No one knows. The animals would know
because they were here long before humans.
We can't really understand their language
yet; but we could learn if we listened."
Which is all her father, poor simpleton, can
manage today, tagging along, listening
to all that we need not say.

Monday, June 13, 2022

FEATHERS OF A DOVE

 

How many trips did we make back then
to the hardware store, as summer
leaned lazily into autumn; how many
dusky shades of blue and gray
holding their secret oceans of light
were mixed on our behalf, a seemingly
endless variety of color swatches
laid out like narrow, unframed windows,
opening onto a bright coastal morning
which no artist could ever have gotten right?
How elegant and whimsical their names,
dreamed up, I imagine, in some drab
and lifeless boardroom, and labeled here
in practiced script: English Chamomile,
Whispering Mist, Feathers of a Dove.
We read them aloud just to hear their music,
the unassuming romance they promised,
the time we longed for most of all.
How many thoughtless brushstrokes
covered the wall at the end of that narrow
hallway, as if the smallest of decisions
could make all the difference for us?
How many weeks before the baby arrived
to parents who could not agree
even on this, our days together already
beginning to flutter from our grasp, restless
and unfinished, all but flying away?

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

THE MOON IN MY HAND

 

Today I held in my outstretched palm
a smooth, flat piece of moon stone,
black, ordinary, impenetrable,
nothing you would consider otherworldly,
nor containing even the smallest
fragment of mystery or light.
Nothing asking to be named or known,
merely a door opening into further darkness.
When my daughter was very small
she would exclaim in joyous wonder
from the balcony, "The moon! The moon!,"
greeting her nightly friend once again.
But this, this cannot be the moon,
I think. This is mere flint, shale, asphalt,
chimney soot swept and hardened
to a coin of no value here below.
No miner would bother to claim it.
But a child can easily see light where
our eyes cannot, can spark a new
world from nearly anything within reach.
We add our stone to the fish bowl
full of earthly ones, our own small piece
of moon, which we read has traveled
hundreds of thousands of miles
to be right here beside us, where we rest
and dream another day into waking.

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

DEAREST BULLY

 

I can still feel the rap of your knuckles,
brother, striking against my own,
stinging, bruising, like four faceless
skulls declaring their dominance.
I can still feel the weighted air shifting
between us, I who was never quite
quick enough to slip from beneath your
reach, and rarely, if ever, managed to connect.
There are things I cannot pretend
to miss -- the swift punch to the shoulder,
the ever-elaborate wrestling holds,
a perfect pearl of milky spit dangling,
like a lazy thought, above my face.
I do not miss the ghost you pretended
to be, silent, tugging, inch by creeping inch,
at the foot of our childhood bed.
Your ghost is real now, free to wander
room to room. And I no longer fear,
though the world you left compels us to.
I miss you in the ways you were soft,
the gentle humor you held close,
the vulnerable boy hidden from view.
I miss the moments you cried, unashamed.
Tonight, as always, I kiss my daughter,
let her snuggle in, as she wraps her
small fingers around my crooked thumb,
drifting effortlessly again into sleep.
It's the kind of calm that I live for,
and would fight this whole world to keep.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

THE BUGGY

 

You won't remember now being quite
so small, combing that long stretch of Carolina
sand for rocks, shells, anything shining,
the ocean insistently whispering its secret
language, untranslatable upon land.
Nor will you recall the wheels of your stroller
edging closer and closer to the waves,
so slowly that none of us took notice,
none but that stout Eastern European woman
in head scarf, waving her thick arms,
shouting in alarm, "The buggy! The buggy!'
For one flashing moment, my heart leapt
like a startled fish, believing she might actually
be right, that you might be spirited away
by the unforgiving Atlantic, to Scotland
or Wales, those fabled white cliffs of Dover,
closer to your family's ancestral home
but further from the ones who love you here.
But, of course, you were right there
when we turned to look, your beach hat
shielding your eyes, your chubby legs
just beginning to learn what they're for,
ready, soon enough, to carry you anywhere.

Popular Poems