Driving to Work

Here comes the old man with his coffee and brown spaniel who goes crazy with wagging to find the bus-stop kids in their loose confederacy. The girl in leg braces wears sweats and a Windbreaker, holds her mother’s hand. It’s spring again; the apple- green buds are only blowsy stains against a frail sky. My own daughter at home in her bed, sick after a three-day fever. Last night I held her in the bath, laid her body against mine, and dipped her hair to the running water, her eyes openly deliberate to this world and the other one half-hidden. And I thought of that famous photograph of the mother and child, that nearly grown girl arching back in a kind of tense spasm, the mother all soft and relaxed with a love of one who has been allowed to hold her daughter forever. Children on the radio, too, real children all over Ireland and the ones in church orphanages and the thousands of charges, thousands over the years. How will they ever bear to be touched and held again? My students are rising and dressing, traveling by city bus or bike or car. They will be waiting in the classroom, waiting for something or anything to happen in their lives. Tired after nights of new love or tired of too-little love. I don’t know how it is that I can come before them, honest and hopeful as they are or deserve to be. I’m trying hard to believe in something as buoyant as the Bradford pears along the road, blowing their white blossoms in a sudden flurry. They keep doing that. Each year, shimmering all at once, making impossible beauty, then throwing it away.