It's National Poetry Month. Here’s an old one that would definitely be included in my Selected. The times, and all of the media coverage, affect us internally, until one day you find yourself responding to something in a way that completely surprises you, and you say to yourself, “Where on Earth did that come from?”
Elegy for the United States of America
for Jacqueline & Zachary-Michael
I pulled up & dropped you off, waved & drove away,
late for work, the schoolyard empty, no group of friends for you
to join, & turned around in a driveway less than a hundred yards
later realizing that I hadn’t seen you enter the building, hadn’t seen
you entering the safety of the hallways, couldn’t see you
entering the haven of a school, my hand already covering
my mouth, eyes moist, the imaginary man emerging from the bushes,
from the tree line, sprinting across an empty schoolyard in my
mind, heading for you like a bullet as I turned in the driveway, you
trudging toward the building with your backpack, lunchbox, violin,
all ten years, me knowing as I backed out of the driveway,
the tears wetting my fingers covering my mouth, that this
was completely irrational behavior, a ridiculous leap, a hole
blown wide in logic, that the man could
just as easily have been a woman, some woman crouching in
the bushes for hours waiting to drown my beautiful daughter
in a bathtub with her lime green hat, purple coat, backpack,
lunchbox, violin, all ten years
but what I saw when I turned was a man,
a man, sprinting across the empty schoolyard because I hadn’t
seen her enter the building, hadn’t watched her into
the building, the omission all the more painful because
we’d been talking about the war, about the suicide
bombers, & I thought to myself, naively perhaps, It is
crazy that I have to explain to my ten-year-old
daughter what a suicide bomber is, that I have to provide her
with a definition for suicide bomber to stow within her
backpack of words & ideas, & I realized as I
passed by the schoolyard too late to see her enter the
safety of the building that I had no idea who was in that building,
who was hiding in that building, who was planning things
in that building, that in some small yet deadly way headlines
are like hand grenades, that it was crazy that priests fondled young
boys, that a woman who wanted a baby drove across the state
& cut one out of another woman’s stomach, that young men
& women were blowing themselves up in cars rigged with
bombs, & I told myself as I cried & turned around & drove
back past the school that this was crazy, that everyone was mad,
that the whole world was raving & that I had to accept this because if I
didn’t then I couldn’t explain why I was driving past the school,
why I was seething with irrational fear, why in the hitch of an instant, between
the flash & boom of a detonated bomb, I saw in my mind
the man sprinting across a schoolyard, saw it with my own eyes, as plain as
anything, saw him sprint across the path of my van, saw him
running down the street, saw him emerge from the bushes, saw him sprinting
across the schoolyard with my eyes which immediately started
to blur, & I wasn’t sure if I was all shook up from the thought of this man
attacking my daughter, from the thought of this sick phantom attacking my
daughter, from the thought of men & women so angry & disturbed
they destroy their own children, from the thought of limbs
& lives being torn by bombs like business as usual
& of course the schoolyard was empty, & I cried off & on all the way
to work, angry that I hadn’t stopped, that I hadn’t satisfied my crazy
impulse, & turning off the van I sighed & took off my glasses &
wiped my face & thought, So be it, you are crazy, & I went
in to work & called the school & asked the secretary to let me
speak with my daughter & was transferred to a phone in her
classroom & explained to the teacher that I was Jacqueline’s father—
& I could tell by the tone in the teacher’s voice that she thought
that this was odd, a little unordinary, but she quickly acquiesced.
And when my daughter said hello, I said, Hi, are you okay,
& she said, Yes, & I could tell by the question in her voice
that she, too, wondered, that she would quiz me after school,
if she remembered, then quickly turned around & told her
that I would talk to her later, that I was just checking:
& somehow I manage to resist
the impulse to ask if she, my
country, is sure.
