Poem for Roland

Jeffrey Harrison

Roland Flint, 1934-2001

This morning I came downstairs and found my seven-year-old
reading your last book, which I'd left on the table,
her blue eyes calm and serious, her lips quietly moving.
She'd misread the cover, taken it on trust: Easy Poems-
expecting maybe something like Shel Silverstein,
though she knew from me that poems don't have to rhyme.

When I explained her mistake, that the title was just Easy,
she kept going, all the way through the poem she was reading,
and didn't ask any questions. I didn't remind her
that she'd met you once, because I didn't want to tell her
you had died. I wanted instead to tell you
about this moment, to hear your generous laugh . . .

When Eliza set the book down thoughtfully and turned
back to her cereal, a bowl (no kidding) of Life,
I picked up the book and opened it to the poem
in which you witness your neighbor, a young father,
impatiently teaching his six-year-old to ride a bike
by telling him over and over he's doing it wrong.

Then I remembered what you could never forget:
the death of your own son when he was six.
And here was Eliza, only one year older now,
a child, like the boy with his gleaming new bicycle,
you wouldn't have been able to look at without thinking
of Ethan, who today would almost be my age.

Yet I knew you would have laughed all the more loudly
to see Eliza in her butterfly pajamas
reading your book, whatever its title,

your delight erupting from a place far down in you
where your grief lived, and deepened by the knowledge
that she'd understood what she'd read

in her own way, that she hadn't made a mistake:
the poems are easy for her now, but won't be later.