Note: I have 3 children. When the youngest was 16, the older two in college, one day after work a child on a bicycle darted out in front of my truck and fell off his bike in the middle of the road, and I came to a screeching fish-tailing tool-slamming stop with my front bumper just inches from that child’s head. The kid glared at me with utter hatred as if it was all my fault. Then he rode away. I could smell the smoke from my tires. And as I sat there shaking it came to me with utter clarity, a message not from my brain but from my heart, that I wanted another child. So I drove (slowly) home and told my wife in the kitchen, who thought I must have bonked my head on the steering wheel but dried her hands on a dish towel and hugged me and thought for a moment and said, “I want one too.” It was crazy to our finances and our health and our ages because if we conceived a child that very day we would be 67 when that child turned 18. As it turned out, that was the exact month that the child-bearing window slammed shut. So at age 67 I was thinking of that time, and I wrote this poem.

To My Daughter Who Was Never Born


I know you are a daughter because 
we already had a boy, a girl, a boy. 
It was a girl’s turn when two cells 
in a womb chanced not to meet. 

Now here’s a prom date waiting, corsage in hand, 
at our door. Aren’t you ready yet? Our family, 
never big on proms. Or dressing up. 
Will you dance in blue jeans?

As parents, we made it hard. 
You, only seven when your mom got cancer. 
Not easy. I’m sorry for that. 

In your fourteenth year, daughter, 
we blew up. Yes, I came down hard on you. 
Stealing a car is serious trouble. 
But I promise not to dwell on that. Except to say 
I secretly admire your gumption to steal 
the candy of a billionaire’s spoiled brat,
to without lessons drive that Jag to San Diego
to free a dolphin who, it turned out, didn’t want 
to leave his private tank where fish appeared 
like magic twice a day precisely timed. 
Some souls prefer order. Not you, not me, this family, 
beyond the bedrock expectations: Get an education. 
Be kind. Don’t steal cars to rescue dolphins.

Here, daughter, some fish.
Next year again I will lose you who I never had
as you burst from your tank swimming, 
leaping the prow of this aging boat 
with such grace, such hope,
your home the ageless sea.

First published in Califragile June 2018


.


Note: This is a true story. The bank is in Woodside, California, a woodsy enclave of wealth. 

Wells Fargo Bank


Noon, I’m next in line behind an old man.
“I want to withdraw fourteen dollars,” he says.
The teller, a young woman with a soft sweater, says
“There’s only—let me check—yes—fifty-two cents.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She tilts her head. “Sorry.” 
The sorrow is genuine.
He wears a pinstripe suit, frayed,
wafting an odor of smoke and earth.
A smartly folded handkerchief, breast pocket, 
has a dark stain. His silver beard 
is neatly trimmed. 

On one wall above the safe is a giant 
mural of teamsters driving a stagecoach.
The man says, “There might be—”
“No. It’s always the same.”
For a moment he closes his eyes, 
a slow blink while indignities of a lifetime pass. 
Without a word, the young woman slides a sandwich 
over the countertop through the teller window.
“Blessings on you,” the man says with a nod,  
and he walks away with a limp.

I cash my check, a big one 
from three days of messy labor 
for a matron of the horsey set. 
“He lives by the creek,” the teller says 
without my asking. “Under a bridge.”
Outside the bank, in the parking lot of glistening cars, 
I look around for the pinstripe suit, the silver beard. 
I might offer the man something. 
He might refuse to take it. 
Anyway, no matter: 
he has disappeared like the last stagecoach. 
Only the blessing remains.

First published in MOON magazine July 2017



Note: This is based on true events that I had to bend into a poem. Sometimes real events are so messy and improbable that truth is better served by an artful alteration.


The Diplomat’s Daughter


can recite the 23rd Psalm in Hindi,
once drank Coca Cola with Martin Luther King,
is 11 years old. I’m 14. 
Public school, we’re the same grade. 
I’m not brilliant, she says. I’m experienced.
We ride the bus. She sits with me, 
walks with me after I rescue her once from
certain ignorant assholes. In a white school
she’s skinny and shy and brown. 

Her father sizes me up, says You can be her big brother. 
I get the drift: Don’t you dare touch her. No worries. 
She knows embassy protocols — when to shake hands, 
when to curtsy, when to kiss both cheeks. I know 
the secret map of where to sit safely in the cafeteria. 
She says We can’t save the world. But we can serve it.

Somewhere between September and April 
she grows less skinny, more female. One day 
she takes my hand when we’re walking
and says In June we’re moving to Singapore.
Sudden pain like stomach gas. I guess it shows. 
I am not your little sister, she says. Do you love me?
At that age I’m compulsively honest, 
so I say I don’t know what love is.
THIS, she says. What you feel right now is love.

We hold hands, kiss a few times, 
sweet stuff, both of us shy, she for once 
as inexperienced as I. Last day she presses 
my hand to her heart, her little breast and says 
I’ll miss you. I’m scared. Goodbye.

A postcard, exotic stamp. Just kids, 
we lose touch. So 40 years pass 
until her photo, name in the news: 
car-bombed fighting polio in Pakistan. 
Served the world. Couldn’t save it. 
In human culture there’s no secret map 
of where to sit, where to not. 
Only this, what we must feel. 

First published in MOON Magazine September 2018​