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Poetry

My aged father and I enjoy the silence between us
as we sit in the Adirondacks, watching the children
playing tag on the lawn and running in circles,
happy to be it or not to be it, happy just to be,
though I know they give no thought to being.
My father leans toward me ever so slightly
and out of nowhere tells me he should have died
at seventeen, on a sunny Sunday, a beautiful day,
much like today. On a lonely country road,
he was driving his father’s new convertible—
he’d taken the car without permission—
and the car suddenly spun and rolled three times,
slamming against a pole and sailing into a summer-
stagnant ditch. My father had no idea how or why—
the road spinning like a needle in a crazy compass—
but afterwards, he said, there came an abrupt peace,
a long silence; then from pines and crowns of trees:
birdsong. A caravan of open-air cars slowly
driving from church to go picnicking at the beach
stopped when they saw my father by the road,
staring down at the half-sunken wreckage.
Asked if anyone had died, my father
met their gaze and told them he had no idea,
and in his muddy shoes began the walk home.
That seemed to be the end of the story. The children—
inexhaustible, exuberant—were now tumbling
and rolling in the grass, the sun a pinwheel in the sky.
The silence was green and blue and filled with light.
In his chair my father studied his grandchildren.
In time he lifted a crooked finger and added
that he walked the miles home and confessed
to his father, who refused to admonish him,
and after that day never gave the car another thought.
But the birds in the trees had brought it all back,
the disobedience and forgiveness. Then in the silence,
I looked up at the pines and heard the birdsong, too.

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