Three poems —
one about the love
in a small bag of pistachios —
and two works of prose
sit unwritten in my notebook;
the spaces aren’t big enough.
Yet, finally,
as the sun rises,
I call my daughter
out to the front steps
where we sit and talk about
yesterday’s and the morning’s
cloud formations
and what they may tell us
about the weather to come.
She watches her own breath
in the cool morning air,
describes the difference between
cirrus and altocumulus,
and asks me my favorite.
I was never more proud of my son than I was that day, just a few weeks ago. Thank goodness that has worn away, so I can keep loving him for who he is.
My wife and I have been working on a landscaping project at the house, converting a thousand-square foot area from grass to perennials and herbs. Grass never grew well in this south-facing area, and I am excited about having even more fresh flowers to cut in future years. As a part of the project, I decided to replace a section of fence with a dry stone wall and to install a border of paving stones between the driveway and this new garden.
A couple of weeks back, the day’s work involved digging a trench for the pavers, sixty feet long and about a foot wide. Being next to an old asphalt driveway laid on top of New England clay soil, there wasn’t much easy digging. As I went, I worked to save the small rocks that came out of the ground, since they would make good fill around the base of the stone wall. This meant sifting out the dirt and sorting the stones into different piles. One foot at a time, on a very warm August Saturday.
My son shuffled towards me relatively early in the day. Can I help, Dad?
I thought for a second about what he might be able to do. My initial reaction was that he wouldn’t be able to help. The pick axe is too heavy for him, I thought. The weight of stones themselves, while small, would add up quickly, and they needed to be piled a good fifty feet from where I was working. The wheelbarrow is too big for him to manage.
Sure, I said, still thinking. Go get a bucket, one of the big ones. And put some good shoes on.
This morning,
our children surrounding you
as closely as the faded sheets,
you were not mine alone
to whisper,
to touch —
the years intervening
since that day
when the air was thicker, closer,
and I climbed down the rocks
near your parents’ house
to swim through the fog in the ocean,
a ritual cleansing of my own choosing.
Each breath of that morning
had been simple,
even anticipation ceasing —
perhaps succumbing
to its own inability
to describe any truth
but an assurance of
love,
holding us both
in unborn arms,
vast oceans,
and summer rainstorms.
Company is coming,
so I wander from room to room
putting things in proper places.
The night air is finally cool
as it drifts through the children’s windows —
I find reasons
to return magazines,
makeshift duct-tape wallets;
to drop off bracelets,
baby food jars filled with water and glitter.
I linger in each room,
the dim and waning light
shadowing small bodies as they sleep,
then turn toward the hallway
and the softness of an old
incandescent bulb
we can’t let go of
shining on the maple floor.
She’s rearranged her room
and proudly invites her father
to admire the work.
It makes up most of her world
on this summer afternoon —
careful placement of
well-worn friends,
books for reading
in the pillowed corner,
a place she has reserved for
hide-and-seek
just behind the bed.
If you lie right there
you can reach the fan, she tells him.
Turn it on, she says —
it smells just like the outside.
Her father looks out the window
as he turns the switch,
the ancient glass curving the view
across the lawn.
It really does, he replies,
tasting in that breath,
just for a moment at
the back of his throat,
the back of his memory,
his own childhood
rearranged room,
just-so and steady.
It has been twenty of your birthdays
since I first saw you walking
in the afternoon light;
you slipped away for a time,
but later
we floated in the
midnight darkness of the lake,
timidly watched the sunrise
from granite steps.
This day bears little resemblance
outside the presence of you and I
and want of a breeze;
others in between are half-forgotten,
depending on photos in an album
to remind us —
yet still I see you walking
and wish you might come
to sit down beside me.
Expectations dashed,
morning arises just the same.
We skirt the space from last night
and busy ourselves
in living —
I understand
the rain should taper off today.
—
There are difficult moments in much of what I write, but I have been reluctant to post something that doesn’t somehow tie up neatly. Not all moments do.
The arc on the old swing is short
and the set rocks uneasily
from so many seasons
in the snow and rain.
He has known it
for all of his five years,
but now runs to it less often,
lingers not as long.
Just the other day
he asked me for a push,
one he doesn’t need anymore —
a big one, he said,
and laughed
as he rose and fell
straining back,
reaching upward.
The blue sky was clear
and closer than it used to be.
—
Completing the set with companion pieces Ten and Almost Eight.
Come close to me, son,
together in the morning air
and tell me
with just your smile
your eyes and your hands
that you love me.
Laugh with me,
rest your cheek close to mine,
and I will tell you too.
Last Thursday, my son woke up early and called to me in his still-morning voice, Daddy, this morning at eight forty-five is Mother’s Day Tea!
It is unusual for him to be excited about something like a Mother’s Day Tea. Special events tend to bring out what shyness he has, and he is not nearly so keen as his older brother on wearing a collared shirt and tie. But sure enough, he had even picked out a special sweater to wear and laid it on his bed.
My wife has been to a lot of these Mother’s Day Tea events over the years as our children have attended the same preschool in turn. Our youngest son is now five and starts kindergarten next year. This year’s Mother’s Day Tea was the last.
Later that same afternoon, I sat with my son on his bed while he showed me some of his new library books and told me about the cookies he had at the tea. He had changed out of his formal shirt and tie and was wearing a dark blue t-shirt emblazoned with pictures of different small whales and the words Nos Amis les dauphins. I love this shirt, and like our preschool and annual Mother’s Day Teas, all of our children have passed through it. One day soon, though, there will be a final wearing as our youngest grows out of it.
We don’t have another child to grow up and go to the next Mother’s Day Tea, or grow into the dolphin shirt. This realization has been arising much more frequently lately, and usually with it the impulse to turn my head to the side and close my eyes, as if turning away from something I would rather not witness.
At first, I was upset with myself for feeling this way. I would take it as an indication that I wasn’t living in the moment. I would scold myself for not being fully present with my children and instead worrying about how we would change as they grew older. Yet as I sat with my son on his bed that afternoon, my deep sadness about this phase of my life changing and receeding was quite real, very much the essence of the moment.
If Zen has begun to teach me anything, it is that the present moment encompasses all of my experience – all of the universe. This includes the desire not be in that moment, or the wish for it to go on forever, despite being fully aware of its impermanence.
I started out my spiritual searching looking for, desperate for, something that would make everything all right. I’ve come to realize, though, that everything isn’t all right – at least not in the way I had hoped.
There was something exquisitely joyful about those moments with my son. And something painfully sad, too. But all of it is my life. The deep intimacy of my life with my children, and the loneliness that comes from knowing we are all of the nature of change. All of it.
Recognizing and being grateful for all of that, that’s what might be all right – and maybe, just maybe, what I have been longing for.
bussokuseki 