POEM: Dear Bernie and John

From Christmas In PA (2012)

Dear Bernie and John

I’m all the way down here in Alabama
a thousand miles south of picking you up
from school or from skiing or from the Y
I wait like a kid at Christmas for Skype
to bring the fleeting gift of your faces
it’s been two and a half years

since I stood on Glendale Ave
watching the Subaru drive away
that weekend I went to New York City
stopping along the Housatonic River
to stand on a series of small boulders
and pluck a large flat rock from the water

I was on my way to visit my own parents
I no longer speak to them, just like I don’t
speak to my biological father, who left
when I was four, the same age you were,
John, when we left one another
you and Bernie and your mother and I

we never had a plan to get back together
just a vague promise that we would
but I decided I needed to make a change
to try to find a way to be happy again
and that meant striking out
on my own for a while, to search

I’ve found something down here
I can’t say what yet, boys
but I’m figuring it out, day by day
before too long I’ll be standing
on solid ground again, and when I am
I’ll be back, I’ll be back, I’ll be back

29 January 2013
Auburn, AL