by Greg McBride

A toddler sprawls across his mother’s slim
and lovely lap, his hair a reddish gold,
his face a whim of freckles. His hands softly
trace her sculpted chin. Waiting too, I feel
a wanting well. Does she know that one day

she’ll yearn to hold him as before? Her hand
spotted, perhaps, as mine, still wearing
the ring his sticky, stubby fingers twirled
around her agile finger, her skin glossy milk.
How persistent, those days which drifted by,
slow, easy, one by one, slipping through
our fingers like river water happy
in the rapids, the falls somewhere ahead.

She, less lovely then, and wan, will want
him still. Perhaps she’ll dream of cherubim,
her boy, like mine, too long a man. Now,
about to roll me away, my own boy
leans from behind. I feel his hand, gentle
at my shoulder, his whisper, Dad,
is there anything you need?

by Greg McBride

It was a moving day, the barn–raising
commune of that time. Afterward, we all

milled about her new apartment, mugs and
stemware in hand, and talked of jobs and songs,

Sgt. Pepper’s Band. We were grad students,
some post–war, most pre–children. Her stuff

was boards, bricks, a platform bed, books and beanbags.
A smoking, single mother in motion and crisis.

Her little girl — coiled on hands and knees,
a sky–blue–eyed three–year–old, her hair

feral tangles of silvered–gold — mugged
up at me, tugging hard at some part of me

I didn’t know I had. That part yielded
all of me, which dove to hands and knees,

where we scuttled and growled over the carpet,
she and I, among chair legs, argyles, penny loafers,

the languorous legs of comely young mothers.
Overhead, they smoked sang–froid, they sipped

of cool, they slid on early disco. It was all
easy give and take. I could’ve stood but didn’t.

by Greg McBride

Buddies for Life
     summer 1961

Squealing rubber slick out of McDonald’s,
our gang of four sixteens, two cars, tears north–
east on 413 toward Langhorne, PA,
two yellow lines from south to Bristol Bridge.
I’m propped on a pillow in full command
of my father’s red Fury, fins flaming
the Saturday night. Behind, big buddy
Eddie sprawls across the suicide seat
of a Galaxie, Bob manning the wheel.
We’re ProKeds and gasoline, wind–billowed
collars, single–file on a two–lane road
to Philly pizza, pool hall, girls, who knows?
We do the do–si–do, the pass–lane–pass,
we swim the road’s smooth ebb and flow, we whoop
and holler. Let’s Twist Again clamors from
AM radio. Under stars that flare
through the night sky’s scrim, our ketchup–stained jeans
jounce Chubby Checker’s beat. Crewcuts cruising,
tailpipes blurting, the Galaxie’s abreast
my Fury, noses ahead, and again,
again, Bob almost evades the ravine.

by Robert Kennedy

Listen. The key is turning
In the derelict lock.
Remember. The exile is strange
And knocks softly on the door,
Not wishing to disturb
The occupiers of his
Memory.

When a father beats
His child
The child belongs
To its father,
As a father belongs
To his motherland
Like the key which,
When turning in the lock,
Becomes the lock.
So, a father becomes
As a child
With sorrow
And the weight of a
Pause,
A snagging
Of the lock.

But I am buried
In mirthless laughter,
Like a moth in a smoking
Candle,
By the weight of
Motherness
In mother.
Mother is supreme, they say.
I hear only silence
And the soft quaking

Of self–sacrifice.
I belong to the ache
Of that silence.

Listen.
The comfort of that silence
Beckons you.
But it will
Bury you,
Silence you,
Kill you.