For My Son

I doubly don’t understand your position in life, son,

male and the baby of a family.

I hope you don’t resent me

and my weakened powers of imagination

for that.

Judging from your personality though,

your gentle joy

and playful energy,

you don’t seem like the type to hold a grudge.

I have held off on writing this to you, my child,

for far too long

and selfishly.

Second child,

wife and mother already before you,

I simply didn’t want to waste any time

I could have spent
just being with you.

Undocumented child,
you and I,

from womb to world,

always living in the busy now,

our motions constant,

our rotations cyclical,

present,

and real.

For the longest time

all I could do to coddle you

was to protect your naps

allowing you to rest

like sacred messiah

until you rose again.

Yet our busy reality has managed to maintain
the odd presence of the amazing.

Both awesome and provincial,

my love for you surprising and idyllic.

Nothing about being a parent before

prepared me for the fear and joy of loving you.

You are always new.

Old soul.

We all knew it.

Everyone said it.

From infancy your eyebrows alone

told tales of ancient tragedies, heroic epics, and comedies

in a wiggle.

I preferred to watch you first crawl
then run

in the beauty of your existence

rather than paint you in an untrue portrait.

Nevertheless, as close as I can come to the truth,

here it is, all flawed and list-like:

you, bookish and athletic,

a undeniable heartthrob by age one.

Your smiles wide,

your eyes dance
direct routes to Truth and Joy.

A hungry yet slim boy

embodying all the happiness and enlightenment associated with

a chubby Buddha

whose pants keep falling down.

Yet also, you, our Bard,

constructing babbling, rhythmic speeches,

illustrating calm, simple solutions to great problems,

pointing again and again to the humanism

and proof of "'Dis.”

Your sister and I your captive audience

and ardent admirers

floating on our backs,

eyes skyward

on your very sound.

You, your father’s breath.

We, helpless but to love you

and delight in your generous laughter.

Poetry has little place

when it is has always been so clear to us all that

you are the final word.

But know that I tried.

Know that despite our inability to give you everything we wanted,

you found all the answers anyway

and ingeniously.

Each moment with you
an everyday miracle

right here

atop the daily grind.

Each moment,

as rough currents,

both real and imagined,

knock about our flimsy shelters,

we learn from you, gentle fish,
born into the world with ease

and swimming through it still

quite effortlessly.

You, forever our baby.

You, forever our moonstone and sun.

Each moment,

my baby,

a chance to make peace

and accept good fortune.

Each moment,

le Benjamin,

an occasion to celebrate

our lives' final word

and be thankful.

Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Divorce

I actually didn’t miss too much about you
after the truth came out.
The week after it ended I cleaned
and found the things you left behind:

my tank top in the middle of the floor-
a black puddle where you threw it,
a beer bottle full of urine,
a bible with a bookmark on forgiveness,
a spider web in the window sill,
your teeth in the carpet.

I told myself
that I should have cleaned this place sooner.
It had been disgusting in here.

And I didn’t care what you sought
in city parks at midnight,
whispering to suspicious looking characters,
“Dealing?”

I didn’t blame you for finding a woman
on a street corner
when she asked,
“Are you looking for somebody?”

I didn’t hate you for what you did
in the front seat of your car
in a seat I thought had been reserved for me.

I miss you when I can’t think about these things anymore.
When I wake up in the night from a dream that you were in
and every detail I forgot.

I reach out beyond consciousness
unconsciousness
subconsciousness
beyond right and wrong
trying to remember
how I would wake
in the night
while you were sleeping.
You would be holding my hand,
fingers twisted like a dug up rooted riddle.
I am a bottomless well.
I still reach to hear I love you
in the silence.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

My Father Had a Soft Way of Viewing the World

My father had a soft way of viewing the world.
The landscape would lie gently upon his eye.
Tenderly, he rubbed the feet of newborns.
Delicately, he glued broken Christmas ornaments.
Sympathetically, he listened to Erik Satie
patiently spell out feeling, piano key by key.
He was a sensitive man, people said,
and I always knew.
But I also saw what the world did not,
the severe anger,
older than he or I,
that resided somewhere
between the ribs and the spine.

Ghost Dance

Rays of sunlight
stretch and lie
out across the grass
like children avoiding chores.

So where is Wovoka,
my father?
Teach me how to Ghost Dance
this fall before the spring.
I don’t care much for the hunt
or farming
so teach me how to dance
for peace and salvation
for when
the grass is high.
I’m old enough to learn.

The sunlight
stretches out across the grass
lying around and rolling about
like a child avoiding chores.
This winter
all the men will be buried
quiet under the new fresh soil
and next spring
the sweet grass
and streams
and trees
and dreams
and buffalo will return.

And all the children
will lie in the tall grass
and laugh
as they roll about
in circles
bellies full
avoiding chores.

And all who dance the Ghost Dance
will be taken up into the air
and suspended there
replaced by the young
lying in the sun
rolling about in the tall grass
playing with shadows
and dreaming dreams.

You As a Symbol

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that
we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom?” -Tench
Coxe

“Omne ignotum pro magnificao….whatever is unknown is held to be
magnificent."




I dreamed about you last night.
It wasn’t the first time,
and even when it was the first time,
I didn’t make anything of it
for its randomness made perfect sense,
or the only sense of nonsense
that I will allow my dreams to be.

But when you reappeared again
and again last night,
I now find myself having to admit
that you are a symbol
of something.
A something that feel certain I knew last night,
but seem to have chosen to forget.

I know I dream constantly in sleep
but some secret promise
I must have made to myself
is that I now blatantly refuse to recall my dreams in any wholeness
or meaning or light.
The reasons for it could be many.
First of all, dreaming proved to me how unimaginative I was –
my dreams merely became my stories;
therefore, I couldn’t take credit for anything.
Being too selfish to admit this,
I instead chose to become Unaware.
Unimaginative followed suit.

The more likely reason, though, is that
during the last few years
my dark dreams became progressively more
and too real,
too frequent to tolerate,
and then, when most raw and open,
in the most wonderful senses of the words
with the birth of my daughter,
I ironically found myself nightly plagued with the terrors of torture
about which I could do nothing
but cower and watch –
or worse,
unintentionally cause,
like slipping uncontrollably on mud in a truck
and crushing over laid out wounded soldiers.
Every night so much death,
so many mutilated men,
and everything felt like fact when I awoke.

So I suppose I made a pact with myself:
you may dream
as long as you forget.

But I do remember that I have been dreaming well lately
and, in at least a few instances,
dreaming of you -
which is further strange because we’ve never met.

Though I can’t remember you,
I feel that if I met you as a child
I would have loved you
openly,
though probably not obviously,
or at least I never would have made you aware
of the wideness of my heart.

The truth is I know somewhere inside of me
what these dreams,
what this childlike love,
is supposed to represent,
but I don’t want to remember
because, though it is simple and innocent,
it can and will
get misconstrued by me, by you, by others.

Still it is so nice knowing you intimately
without sight or touch:
knowing that you are good
and believing that you find me worthwhile
to spend time with every so often,
to share with me the things you think
without the complications of intention or strife.

I don’t know how it feels except to say
that when I wake
it feels like we are defeating the death
bad dreams are made of.

As a result, I have had fleeting moments of silly today
where I wonder who people dream of
and whether people dream of each other simultaneously.
I also have had sad moments
where I wonder if my daughter has nightmares
of frightening shadows
that she has never really seen before.
But I wonder too if she can read my mind,
and why she appears to telepathically know
when I soundlessly
watch her sitting in her crib
talking to a picture of Pinocchio
through the most microscopic crack in the door.
At these moments she will knowingly turn and smile directly at me,
as though I called to her
knowing before I do
what my next move should be.

Today I also questioned whether love in heaven -
if there is a heaven -
is even remotely close to what we make it in waking life.
And, though I don’t believe in “heaven,”
I do believe that I should teach my daughter that It exists,
even for those you’ve never met,

for,
if dreams serve to teach us anything,
I feel
that you -
as a symbol -
are certainly a symbol
of that.