February 19: Daughter, Milestones, "Praise for Waiting"

Tonight, I turn to a poem I wrote a long time ago, when my daughter would still let me sing to her at night before she fell asleep.

I just attended my daughter's last dance open house, after twelve years of dance open houses.  In a few months, she will be walking across the gymnasium floor in her cap and gown.  I want time to slow down.  Getting a little tired of encountering milestones every day.  I thought it was bad enough when my daughter got her braces taken off.

Saint Marty isn't ready to be the father of a high school graduate.

Praise for Waiting

by:  Martin Achatz

I scribble these lines in my journal

As I wait for my daughter’s ballet

Class to end, her to come out of the studio,

Flushed from grand jeté, allegro, pirouette.

I treasure these moments of waiting

At the end of the day, in my car,

Radio silent, evening creeping into air

Like frost on a kitchen window, delicate

Fingers of cold and dark.  This moment,

Suspended between dinner and sleep,

Seems timeless, the way pictures of Garbo

Seem timeless, black-and-white, eyes

Focused upward, as if some lover

Hovers above her, waiting to press

His lips to hers, taste her meter, rhythm,

Sonnet of skin, snowdrift body.

Words cannot, will not touch these long

Seconds, no verb or adjective coax

Onto page the pure pleasure of possibility,

Reaching out like an unwritten poem.

I close my eyes, understand why Garbo

Flickered out when she did, left the world

Waiting for one last word, one last glimpse.

A snapshot.  My daughter caught mid-leap,

Waiting, as we all do, to descend.

March 3: Son's Timeline, Rita Dove, "Fifth Grade Autobiography"

My son is in first grade, and we have to help him create a timeline of his life, replete with milestones and pictures of said milestones.  Things like first birthday, first Halloween costume, first tooth, first time he punched somebody on the playground and got detention.  We did the same assignment with my daughter when she was in second grade, I believe.

I remember my daughter's timeline making me a little melancholy.  Just looking back, thinking of how much she'd already grown.  Time goes by so fast.  It seems like yesterday that we brought my son home from the hospital, had that first of many sleepless nights with him.

Rita Dove has a poem that sort of captures this nostalgic sorrow.  Most poets do.  It goes with the territory.

Saint Marty can attest to that.

Fifth Grade Autobiography

by:  Rita Dove

I was four in this photograph fishing
with my grandparents at a lake in Michigan.
My brother squats in poison ivy.
His Davy Crockett cap
sits squared on his head so the raccoon tail
flounces down the back of his sailor suit.

My grandfather sits to the far right
in a folding chair,
and I know his left hand is on
the tobacco in his pants pocket
because I used to wrap it for him
every Christmas.  Grandmother's hips
bulge from the brush, she's leaning
into the ice chest, sun through the trees
printing her dress with soft
luminous paws.

I am staring jealously at my brother;
the day before he rode his first horse, alone.
I was strapped in a basket
behind my grandfather.
He smelled of lemons.  He's died--

but I remember his hands.

Yup, I remember that