From the Family Notebook

Roasting Tomatoes

Family silence is filled
with the clicking of washing
machines and dishwashers--
how nice to know our things
are being cleaned.

But what else is that
joy that sets in
after turning certain knobs?

Say it's
Sunday afternoon,
you're roasting tomatoes and oil
and garlic in the oven
on a low heat,
your child is sleeping,
your wife, who is pregnant,
is sleeping--you latch
the dishwasher and crank it
into place
and,

having torn the basil
that will finish the dish
into smallest feathers
you sit down with separate musics
to make one.

Bastard Language

What ashen meritocracy
has held us so long?
And in what hands? Even
our language bends,
betrays, letting us say
only so much. The word
navigates truth and untruth,
seduction and repulsion.
Language is there, always,
between us.

In the Park on Sunday . . .

with the family and extended family.

We showed up with balls and small golf
clubs and water and sunglasses.

Hoping for the alternating currents of sport
and rest.

Sometimes one of us fell back from our sitting
onto our backs to gauze the trees

with sight. I thought something
common enough: sweet joy

of doing nothing. Then, the naming of doing nothing.

The naming of doing nothing

is a terrible affliction. Around noon
I went for sandwiches

and bought back more dessert than
solid food: a calculated error

to see what they would call it. But
they just laughed and patted me on the back

and said my name.

What Can Never Be Written on a Post-It Note and Hung on the Fridge

When you make a family
invite a little
chaos too,
a little noise--and open
the frame, open the frame,
open it! to hold
the splitting home.

Someone Has to Worry . . .

I guess, about
cracks in the present
that menace the future.
The classic argument rests on two grounds:
the fence keeps them out; the fence holds us in.
Was it Louise Simpson who said
even a little thing, such as shaving,
contains a philosophy? Leonard Cohen said,
"There's a crack in everything, and
that's how the light gets in."
If you heard that last one
at the right time--among carefree, college
friends, say, or while reading the Existentialists--
it's possible you may have been convinced.
Years later, pushing on into the family
years, disruption and uncertainty
might be small time gods to you. Someone,
your wife maybe, can think the opposite.
That I can think one thing and you
think another and she an absolute
third . . . the many eyes of creation
trying to live together, at last.

Farther

Belief in accretion,
that it will add up and be counted. That it will add up,
square its shoulders, and sing. Or whisper.
That it will not shrug.

We are what we can be,
aren't we?

Twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes to go. Pray
faster and deeper and somehow . . . what is hidden
will spark itself home.

Perhaps necessarily I am less easily impressed,
and this dethrones the electric
moment. Thus,

in the stillblack, away from the city, fireflies are
becoming ordinary. It is my fault,
isn't it?

Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, to go. That you will or will not
break through such tiny splatterings, such
tiny yawns, to

what? What can we, should we
call it?

Concentration, like an old girlfriend,
I sometimes remember fondly, behold
the father and the husband and
the worker. I cannot unhook
my one true life
from my three.

Make me again, and start with
less attachment. But
that's a lie, too. We wouldn't last
without what holds us,
a cauterwaul,

a wailing lump of bones and blood and
flesh.

And so we come to the museum
of fatherhood
again . . . step right up

to small rage, tender mercy, and the perfection
of confusion, the failure of joy, amen.

On the Last Night at the Beach . . .

I parked the car along the sand, full moon
floating like a lonely astronaut. I spent
a few minutes watching the waves, then walked
back through the cricket racket as it became
first song, then pulse, then worn pulse, then song,
through the clean-empty streets, the slight
trill of coolness in air that was mostly warm--
and I thought I could stay out all night.
That I once would have followed such a thread
just because it appeared, or would be
nice to talk about, didn't help.

Did I invent new ways to be selfish then? Did I
climb the stairs of the inn with sighs blistering
my feet? Sure, sure. But when I opened
the door and saw A. and H. in bed beneath
a dim light, reading a book, and H. stood up
to thank me in his garbled and beautiful
language, I realized that we can very rarely
call it like we see it, though to hobble anything
with a name
is the most inhuman, human act I know.