Family matters

Doctor

Rockford officially graduated last night. I got a little choked up when the graduates filed in, and I thought there might even be tears when he walked across up on the stage.

Alas …

Poppy was cheerful for most of the evening. We’d packed a few of her books, and she always likes to be around new faces. And there were plenty of new faces there to see. The graduation was late in the evening, though, and she was getting tired. So I gave her a bottle and she started to fall asleep and Rockford was approaching the stage and then?

Poppy exploded. Baby yak everywhere. On me, on the floor, on Phoebe’s purse and book (but, thankfully, not on Phoebe).

So I missed it, mostly. I caught most of the pomp, but I missed the circumstance altogether. Or did I see the circumstance and miss the pomp?

Reading

"At Twenty-Eight"

American Life in Poetry: Column 059

By Ted Kooser
U.S. poet laureate

Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her life as serendipitous, yet she doesn’t shy away from acknowledging loneliness.

At Twenty-Eight

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.

“At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury is reprinted from “Beautiful Trouble,” Southern Illinois University Press, 2004, by permission of the author. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2, Fall/Winter 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.