While the others ate their dinner and discussed the day, one went
Out to a chair on the lawn after dark, under a comical, shadowy tree
And he felt a breeze, and he watched the headlights of the cars on the top leaves
As they parked in the restaurant lots down the streets, and the stars
Came out like civil servants in the darkened courtyard of a deposed emperor
To greet him, although he was no more than the thought of them, and he thought:
It's almost a family tradition, among my daughter's female ancestry,
To grow up without a father in the house. Her mother's father was gone before
Her mother turned two, and her mother's mother's father was killed
In a prop-engine plane crash as an Alaskan bush pilot
When his daughter was six. Her mother's mother's mother's father perished of MS
When she was still a child. My mother's father died of fever at age forty-four,
In the pre-antibiotic age, nineteen-twenty-seven, before she was born.
My mother was named after him. My daughter didn't have to be named after me.
But who knows what world we're in. The river is the same I'm standing in. I am not.
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