Henry Taylor, “At the Swings”
I’m left cold by a lot of free verse, but this one by Henry Taylor breaks down my resistance entirely. It’s the concluding poem in his 1986 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection The Flying Change. A week and a half ago Mr. Taylor turned 80.
At the Swings Midafternoon in Norfolk, late July. I am taking our two sons for a walk away from their grandparents’ house; we have directions to a miniature playground, and I have plans to wear them down toward a nap at five, when my wife and I will leave them awhile with her father. A few blocks south of here, my wife’s mother drifts from us beneath hospital sheets, her small strength bent to the poisons and the rays they use against a spreading cancer. In their house now, deep love is studying to live with deepening impatience as each day gives our hopes a different form and household tasks rise like a powdery mist of restless fatigue. Still, at five my wife and I will dress and take the boulevard across the river to a church where two dear friends will marry; rings will be blessed, promises kept and made, and while our sons lie down to sleep, the groom’s niece, as the flower girl, will almost steal the show. But here the boys have made an endless procession on the sides, shrieking down slick steel almost too hot to touch; and now they charge the swings. I push them from the front, one with each hand, until at last the rhythm, and the sunlight that splashes through live oak and crape myrtle, dappling dead leaves on the ground, lull me away from this world toward a state still and remote as an old photograph in which I am standing somewhere I may have been before: there was this air, this light, a day of thorough and forgetful happiness; where was it, or how long ago? I try to place it, but it has gone for good, to leave me gazing at these swings, thinking of something else I may have recognized— an irrecoverable certainty that now, and now, this perfect afternoon, while friends are struggling to put on their cutaways or bridal gowns, and my wife’s mother, dearer still, is dozing after her medicine, or turning a small thing in her mind, like someone worrying a ring of keys to make small sounds against great silence, and while these two boys swing back and forth against my hand, time’s crosshairs quarter me no matter where I turn. Now it is time to go. The boys are tired enough, and my wife and I must dress and go to church. Because I love our friends, and ceremony, the usual words will make me weep: hearing the human prayers for holy permanence will remind me that a life is much to ask of anyone, yet not too much to give to love. And once or twice, as I stand there, that dappled moment at the swings will rise between the lines, when I beheld our sons as, in the ways of things, they will not be again, though even years from now their hair may lift a little in the breeze, as if they stood somewhere along their way from us, poised for a steep return. |
Yup, that is quite lovely - thanks for posting. He manages simplicity very well, and sustains the space needed to write that long poem.
Cheers, John |
The boys' lifting hair at the arc of the swing always caught in time's crosshairs. That makes you catch your breath. Beautiful.
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Yes, the last stanza gives me shivers too. I’ve always wondered about “poised for a steep return.” A steep return on the swings is clear, but later in life, when the boys are “somewhere along their way from us,” what does the return mean? A trip home? Eventually one to take care of elderly parents? Just musing.
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