Poem for Roland

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.