I wrote a poem that I don't dislike. It happened one morning when I was waiting for a professional development day to start, and as hard as it is to believe, the poem held my interest more than the PD program.

The first line isn't true, but it's close enough. I was given permission to write something that isn't true by Franz Wright when I saw him speak at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival. He was talking about a poem he wrote about writing his first poem; in it, he changed his suburban house to a farmhouse. Why? Because he has an imagination and the permission to use it. Everything else is true, but without that first liberty, the poem doesn't happen.

I write all this stuff because I ask students to write the story of their poems, to write what they like about them, and to write what they're unsure about. For this poem, I like the way I wrote lines, and I like the way the ending found me without any heavy-handedness on my part; it was one of those moments when you feel that deep satisfaction of having something happen in a piece of writing that serendipitously fits what you're trying to do. What I'm unsure about is the word "tropes." I initially resisted it because it's not exactly the literal right word, but the more I think about it, the more protective I get about the word. Still, there's probably something to my initial misgivings.

Is that enough prelude? Here's the poem.

Absence

A woman I know is mourning a baby
she never held, a little girl
buried under the rubble of an orphanage

in Port-au-Prince. How ridiculous,
the cynic in me thinks,
to fall in love with the idea of a person.

Something there is that nags me
this morning, something there is
that tells me to write about something

that isn’t there.

A pregnant woman walks into the room
the moment I write that line.
She is expecting, and her hope, to her,

is real. Inside her, someone lives. She
feels it kicking in her belly. She sees,
through the miracles of science,

through a little gel, a little electricity,
a round head, little arms, little fingers.
She hears the thrumming of a little heart.

One wonders what her husband hopes.
He’s expecting, yes, but images unfelt:
a swaddled face asleep in the cradle of his arms;

a baseball midair backgrounded by a boy
in an oversized hat on a sun-kissed green field;
the rite of passage of a first beer together.

I had a boy, maybe, once;
it was too soon to tell. He was
the third child we never had,

but the first one I made real.
Through him, I lived all the tropes
of American fatherhood.

And then, on the last Easter morning of the second millennium,
at the moment perhaps that Mary Magdalene finds
an empty tomb, that dream died.

How obscure, how elusive, the movement of the soul!
A bee flitting from flower to flower
in a field of goldenrod;

a leaf falling from a tree, scattered
by the wind; a moon waxing and waning,
always full, always halved, always quartered;

a wave crashing against the cold cliff wall,
reabsorbed by the vastness from which it came
that it might lick the fine sand of some warm beach

to chase a child back to his father’s embrace.
I’ll never let go of that boy,
the one I never held.