Will Thomas

Will Thomas Poems

(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
...

5: 30 a.m., March 17,1982

It is
(I am sure,
...

I am a 59-year-old
male teacher
of teen-aged girls,
or young women,
...

This boy,
seven years old,
...

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,
...

5 a.m.
Alight and alone.
Modest and mauve.
...

In the loveliest
and loneliest springtime
I have ever known,
May moves me
...

When I was nine,
I broke my father's watch.
Not the silver Timex he wore around his wrist-
the (tarnished) gold pocket watch
...

Almost the middle of October.
It has rained for days.
No thunder.
Nothing grand or splashing,
...

The sign on the door:
Trauma Room.

A nurse,
...

a poem of thanks for my former wife

'Did you see the rainbow
in the western sky this morning? '
...

He was cinders,
dying embers
in the bruised-black, near-dawn chill.
...

The ugliest,
crudest,
most racist
and rudest
...

'And then the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little-less-nothing. And that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
...

Today,
on a piece of
yellow legal paper,
filled with
...

This morning,
at about ten after eight,
eyes still aching
from all of those tears,
...

The Best Poem Of Will Thomas

Prognosis

(for my children, and for all my friends on shore)

Forty-nine days later,
after his wife
-operatically and quite literally-
in the desolate 4 a.m.-ness of a bleak November morning,
walked out
on him, a fifteen-year marriage, and a foolish gray cat
(antiseptic words of 'feelings for someone else' trailing after her,
searing snapshots of betrayals and manipulations
washing over him,
a spiraling descent,
hell beyond flame or forgiveness) :

Forty-nine days later,
faint and flickering indications of a pulse:
the first 24 hours without tears,
ragged sobbing,
primal screaming on hands and knees.

And today,
scarcely a week or so beyond
that timid shadow of a victory,
this piecemeal poet,
teacher of history, literature (irony, symbol) ,
rescued three or four Christmas ornaments
from the 75%-off table at the local Pier One-
not at all the intent of this mid-January outing,
but they caught (his heart) his eye.

Hours later,
while he vacuumed the family room carpet,
the thought began to find its shape:
leftover ornaments,
a holiday almost 12 months away,
an unintentioned nod to a future
where he might find a place.

A 57-year-old man,
famished, of late, for death
(clumsy, pathetic,
and ultimately aborted footfalls in that direction:
garage exhaust,
a belt in the basement eaves on the night before Christmas,
a colorfully lethal trail mix of three different anti-depressants) :

This man,
it turns out,
is going to live.

And, yes,
(tucked away on a bitter and chill January eventide,
awaiting the swaddling darkness,
the healing dance of candlelight) ,

this man,
now sitting up
and taking nourishment,

this man,
this man
wants
to
live.

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