Category: Poetry

Some things today had me thinking about a poem from The Lit Window and the choices I began making a long time ago and continue making today. As I said to a friend today, I’ve never regretted choices I made in favor of family and relationships.

Contemplating Failure

I wanted like a cat to measure myself
by whisker deeper into the dark passage.
Instead, I’ve been father and teacher,
proclaiming some prairie noon as if–

I keep thinking. To his daughter’s offered rose
Rodin’s thought was stone. Rilke’s family
passed him unattended like the distraction
of a passing wagon. Faulkner claimed a good fiction
outvalued a mere old woman. Byron burned years
in homage to a season. And Yeats pretended
we must choose perfection of the life or of the work.

And yet I winter the job conversations of men
rapt in the clever implications of each other’s
notions about someone’s accountant’s interpretation
of the latest version of the tax code

and come home to my trailer filled with children
and books and sink in getting something done
while Eldon Tarzan-yells from the perilous edge
of the coffee table and Gwendolyn tells
the wide-eyed truth to a mobile yellow telephone
and Christabel remembers with fragmentary
and long-winded exactitude the rapid magic
of a cartoon feud and for the fifth, I think, time
Thucydides says something about the confusion
of power and will–

I am where I want to be.