Poem for Sunday and Lake Whetstone Goslings

Another Country
By Ryan Teitman

The days unfold
like maps. Fresh dirt
in the garden, black
as cake, grows warm.

The roses perform
a silent recital,
each playing its part
from memory. I wait

for my father the way
men wait for a train.
I wait for my father
the way a dancer

waits for music.
My mother is a curtain
in the window.
She calls me in

to fit my shadow
for a suit. I keep still
as she pinches the tape
around its wrist.

Around her neck
my mother's pearls
clink like teeth.
Your shadow grows

faster than you do,
she says. She says
that waiting is
a kind of dancing.

At night I dance
with the stillness.
My blood waits
behind my chest

like a man behind
a locked door.
My father waits
in another country.

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Quickie since we have been watching the Jackman-Fassbender-McAvoy Graham Norton Show, which is hilarious, and now we are watching Saturday Night Live, which is mediocre at best. Adam had a track meet in the morning, then we took him to Home Depot and Target to get parts for a camera project and a birthday present for a friend. While Nashville was getting renewed and Michael Sam was becoming the first gay man drafted into the NFL, we stopped at Lake Whetstone, where it was drizzling but we saw herons, ducks, and many geese and goslings:















Adam went out to dinner with a group of friends for his girlfriend's birthday while Paul and I came home, took a walk around the neighborhood to see the baby bunnies, chatted with neighbors, ate twice-baked potatoes, and watched X-Men: The Last Stand with Cheryl since we all wanted to see it again before Days of Future Past (I watched the NYC premiere livestream, too). I hadn't realized X3 had so many deleted scenes on the disc, including one which leads right into The Wolverine.

Happy Mother's Day if you are a mother, have a mother, or love someone like a mother!