I first read this poem in public at the book launch of Olivia Thomakos’s Love & Other Cancers. I’m grateful to have shared the stage that evening with Olivia, the poet Stephanie Space, and Professor Nicole Willey.
In the poem, I’ve attempted to capture vivid details of an imagined kayaking excursion in which a young father witnesses a moment of connection between his wife and son. I revised through several drafts to achieve greater clarity of expression, sharper pacing, and more formal coherence.
His Whole Hand All at Once
If he hadn’t demanded this time to ride in your kayak,
you would’ve missed your son’s reaching into the flow,
fingers wide like a mind overrun, or an open mind.
The river covers the whole of his hand all at once.
Its mud-rich surface is stuck in places with pilings
he mistakes for the spires the castles he’s dreamed up
wear as crowns. They remind you how you used to thread
a handful of your mother’s camel-eye sewing needles
through the high layers of skin on your palm. Painless--
almost. But that was you then: always skirting the line,
willing to risk a little discomfort, even pain,
in pursuit of the space between discovery and rupture.
The river surface, placid this late in the season, softens
as he withdraws his hand. As if perturbed by this softening,
he plunges his hand in again, working it like an oar,
creating drag, pulling the kayak’s nose bank-ward.
Easier to say nothing, dip the oar, pull until he decides
on his own to let go the water. Again, the surface settles.
It’s an hour or two south to where the car’s parked.
The spaces between tree limbs fill with signing birds.
A car tire has washed ashore. A doll. Myriad plastic.
A jacket entangles the milk-white branches of a downed tree.
Your son begs you to tell him how these things got there
just as your wife, who has paddled fifty yards farther ahead
in her own kayak, calls back something you should’ve heard
but didn’t because your son was asking about the baby.
Not a baby, you tell him; a toy someone lost the need for.
Your wife’s shoulders shrink then swell as she rows,
pulling her oar through a greasy skein in the shallows
near one of the pilings. You think she has spied fish,
but when she points, you see she’s trying to direct your gaze
to where two train cars, tankers, hunker in the shadows
cast by river-fed trees still teeming with birdsong
like too-large carp too heavy to find tow in the current.
Good to see strength returning to her body gradually,
perhaps too gradually for her notice. Your son is three,
but she’d relinquished much to bearing him, then suckling him,
then weening him. How many long nights awake with him?
How many heartbreaks as he reached for things beyond her?
You reach, pull through the skein, feeling a swim of guilt
at the thought that even this, his choosing your boat over hers,
represents another turning-away. Betrayal maybe
is too strong a word. The tankers’ wheels have rusted to the rails.
The bubble-swirls of graffiti seem so carefully rendered,
error-free, accidents of any kind brushed or colored out—
or perhaps nonexistent? Could anything so grand
have come into the world pure and consistent?
You tell the boy to look where his mother is pointing,
to see what she’s showing him, there’s a gift in it,
but he doesn’t know the word. You try present, then surprise.
He squints at the afternoon light, tilling the river by hand.
Your wife has turned her kayak and taken out her phone, safe
in its waterproof bag, its trio of lenses aimed at you.
It’s unclear whether she has already snapped a picture.
You urge your son to smile, show his face to Mommy, wave.
While you’re coaxing, you recall leaving your phone in the car.
It scares you to think that today’s pictures will show only you
paddling your son toward a moss-choked piling and a bridge
that no longer exists. You lift your oar, surrender
to the current, shout that she’ll need to toss you her phone.
She blocks her face with it and begins singing, “Cheese!”
She holds the note, a clean clear sound, and it seems the birds
have quit when your son lifts his hand, water streaming
like glass from his fingertips, and waves, echoing her song.
Patrick Faller 