Still: The Journal

It was a Wednesday, probably sunny or cloudy. Probably the wind didn’t carve deep. Probably traffic wasn’t fast enough for my parents. Probably the hospital doors weren’t yet automatic, had to be pushed open with a hand or elbow. Probably it was a day like any other machinery, ordinary in its time and turning, except for my arrival and exit, for probably as I entered somebody left—probably not because of me but because that’s how life was and is, these decades now from then.

Overhearing My Son’s Bedtime Story

In the next room, I hear each soft—

the pages flipping between fingertips, 

and I imagine the anticipation on his face, 

his eyes cast to the next brush-stroked bloom: 

an ice cream cone and the bear’s curling lips, 

that bright tongue with a wisp of drool 

winged from its peak. I hear his questions 

as she stops, mid-sentence, from describing the 

bear’s glowing and watery eyes eager toward 

a ring of sugar and fat, to answer him. Her each 

word as tedious as the pages, his next questions 

blathering and unbidden, tossed between them, 

his mind and her mind scattered out like goose 

down pillows freed open. And I am, though close, 

a world from theirs.