By: David Ignatow

How was it possible, I a father
yet a child of my father? I
grew panicky and thought
of running away but knew
I would be scorned for it
by my father. I stood
and listened to myself
being called Dad.

How ridiculous it sounded,
but in front of me, asking
for attention—how could I,
a child, ignore this child’s plea?
I lifted him into my arms
and hugged him as I would have
wanted my father to hug me,
and it was as though satisfying
my own lost childhood.

My father has a pair of shoes
So beautiful to see.
I want to wear my father’s shoes.
They are too big for me.

My baby brother has a pair
As cunning as can be.
My feet won’t go into that pair.
They are too small for me.

There’s only one thing that I can do
Till I get small or grown.
If I want to have some fitting shoes
I’ll have to wear my own.

A child’s a plaything for an hour;
     Its pretty tricks we try
For that or for a longer space;
     Then tire, and lay it by.

But I knew one, that to itself
     All seasons could controul;
That would have mock’d the sense of pain
     Out of a grieved soul.

Thou, straggler into loving arms,
     Young climber up of knees,
When I forget thy thousand ways,
     Then life and all shall cease.

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case homegrown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Handpressed with greengage wine.

Nothing is cost effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
handsown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.

In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.

Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!

Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.

Sweet and low, sweet and low,
     Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
     Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
     Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
     Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
     Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
     Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame
To show how well he has played the game;
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.

Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more
Plodding along in the daily strife,
Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,
With never a whimper of pain or hate,
For the sake of those who at home await.

Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,
Merely one of the surging crowd,
Toiling, striving from day to day,
Facing whatever may come his way,
Silent whenever the harsh condemn,
And bearing it all for the love of them.

Only a dad but he gives his all,
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing with courage stern and grim
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen:
Only a dad, but the best of men.

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow
glimmered in the deeper reaches
where my son and I could hear the slub
of water riddling through the muck.

We’d stumbled on it following a stream,
his first cave made stranger still
by a chill that closes on the goblined heart
of a boy inflamed by stories where

gnome-clans hoarded underground
bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland,
and eel. And so, grave Hansel
paying out his last scraps of bread,

he inched inward looking back
and gathering himself as he devolved
step by step along the wet-ribbed walls,
the omphalos seepage of a subterrane

that dreamed us into its kingdom come,
where like some secret dreams
make known the burnt-punk smell
of marijuana cluttered up the air,

and just beyond, just close enough to see,
a spur of light that like a dwindling
eyemote disappeared. Then the sound
a human soul makes as it slips out

from the throat. Composed in darkness,
my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent
to whisper we could turn back now,
but his voice was there before me saying,

“Something’s here.” And something was,
something that in that instant rose,
and moved off from us, or drew up close.
In either case, my son came to me

almost weightlessly at first, then hungry
for what was filling up my arms,
the startled, upriding bodyweight
of a boy I’d never before felt rock

so solidly into the place I was,
blind and hunkered in the earthen air.
I held him only a moment there.
We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze

of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears,
for weeks to come, settling him back
to sleep at night, or waking him
from some troubling dream, I’d hear

the soft concussion of an outsized heart-
beat I could not decide was mine,
or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to.
Or if what happened would happen again,

years from now, when he is grown,
and I have grown newly strange to him.

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.