In September


Do they, still? or is the journey rid
of ritual, and solitary – not
an end to adolescence, which cannot end,
but a restructuring?  The check
has been deposited (it was always about money),
the last inadequately felt
conversation or tearfest finished,
the car (it was always about cars) crammed
with ill-packed clothes and electronics,
and the kid leaves as the parents leave for work –
the dorm, however many hundred miles
away, a sour anteroom to offices;
the self, whether sworn
to narrow ends or endless indefinition,
an ever-waning, ever-escaping star.

No – they still, here and there, accompany
their children, make
a show of parking, carrying, and embarrassing:
the father eyeing each passing lout
and pausing, as if to question or fight
(will he be the first?), the daughter glancing
though scarcely in search of her first;
the mother mourning the ingrained grime
of sills and sheets and acoustic tiles,
seeing exactly what her son sees:
indifference transcending complaint.
(Perhaps the boy is romantic
and thinks he will soon be alone.
Perhaps the girl is a scholar
who has lived under the sign of anomaly.)

Then goodbye – until the first appeal for funds,
a place to crash for a month or decade,
mysterious impossible understanding . still,
goodbye.  The parking lot, that tricky turn;
the onramp; silence.  Or perfunctory stoicism,
Weltschmerz, companionable
critique.  The rest of the father's life – as always, though uncomfortably slowly – funnels into his next tangential
remark, his next investment, last affair,
while, like a balloon that tires of a child's
hand, or captivity, love
rises from the mother
and to her straining eyes appears
to swell a moment in the upper air.