Trying to Write About My Youngest Son
—for Michael
It doesn’t help when—my eyes
closed, head tilted back
to picture you more distinctly
as the second tallest now
among your three adult brothers—
you come strutting again
through the preschool’s double-doors,
serious as a police commissioner,
the tail on your tissue-paper kite
zigging the tulip-lined sidewalk
behind you, your face all
bouncing cheeks, perfect, pouting lips.
Or that when I manage to capture
your chiseled jaw and shoulders
but can’t come up with a better word
you barrel back from Ann Arbor
in your Cherokee, and chiseled
is still the only word. This spree
from tee ball to a degree
in engineering—
what your grandfather, my father,
and your great-grandfather
mastered before you—what your
beautiful mathematical mind
has finally decided for you—
compresses within me
as if the squeeze box of my years
were in full exhale, my hands
pressed together around it
like a little boy’s, in prayer.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching university writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, USA. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021), and his work appears internationally in many anthologies and journals.