this tearless father

i did not weep when you crowned in the canal i watched the violence to your mother's pink and pliant flesh and witnessed blood and the pale effusive waters i gave love to your mother lying on her back held her hand and wiped her brow and watched her shake but i was not one of those fathers who wept i saw majesty in your birth; an alien grandeur the expulsion of your...

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the baby in the lap of the poet

see this child climbing into my lap this morning just when the muse flew in on her wing one an angel in blond pigtails and a runny nose the other a capricious sprite i'd grabbed my pen and pad just then feeling the flutter of wing when the child - guided by her own covert specter - crossed the room and placed a hand on my knee the pen falls to child and to home to wife, to pet to lovemaking to sleep to prayer some poets -most all- dogged by...

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the time that it takes us

the time that it takes us to unfold beneath blankets is the length of ages children to bed dogs restful and snoring the cats in the kitchen finally abandoning their chase the night now is a quiet thing laid over us - a coverlet of calm we both have equal wants in the darkness; his greater than hers is the old myth passion is something to do with the heart and the...

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mothers of sons

outside my window the blossoms of a flowering tree bob in the wind at the ends of branches like the heads of boys in the arms of a tired mother the boys, these blossoms, are restless and eager and the mother, this tree, bends her arms to let them wag but refuses to release them entirely i don't know the names of the flowers on all those sun-laden trees any more than...

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The girl who loved dorothy the most

i was at an event and she called my name from across the tops of the heads of a crowd a mother holding her daughter the one who's been through hell i don't get called across the heads of crowds too much really and turned to see the two wading in a line of shuffling bodies the girl is a spray of wildflowers in the arms of her mother the unbreakable vase they know hospital...

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April 10th

my father took me, a suspicious son toward the casket where his own father lie it was 1979 i wore a K-Mart suit jacket and a clip-on tie and my father had to tamp down my cowlick with spit-in-palm my father celebrates  his birthday on april 10th even though he discovered late in life that his birth certificate says the 9th my grandmother ina having...

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to the three girls waiting in line

i. the girl waiting in line turned and kicked the boy behind her squarely in the crotch and he fell to his knees like a melon dropped from a roof the principal was summoned from his office and he stood, square-jawed over the fallen who wailed and rocked with his knees to his chest we all gathered in a circle around them the girl with her arms crossed looked down on the...

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The Community, The Family

Me, directing Oz while comforting Toto In 1999, my two oldest children were 7 and 5 and would accompany me to the grand Fuller Hall auditorium at St. Johnsbury Academy for rehearsals. We were staging Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's musical that stitches several fairy tales into a fabulously dark tapestry about princes and princesses and witches and dead cows and...

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