(for my children, and for all my friends on shore)
Forty-nine days later,
after his wife
...
In the middle of the summer,
when I was twenty-two
and wore sneakers with no socks
and was growing my first beard,
...
In the long, narrow hall of home,
hangs a bleached and fading picture of four-year-old me:
holding hands with his bushy browed grampa,
wearing one of those plaid wool caps
...
I am a 59-year-old
male teacher
of teen-aged girls,
or young women,
...
On the steamy summer day
when we buried my father,
I was twenty-two,
dressed in a borrowed three-piece suit,
...
Humbly, he had hoped for more,
in this the third Christmas
beyond the all-day therapy sessions,
the all-night interventions,
...
In the loveliest
and loneliest springtime
I have ever known,
May moves me
...