We’ve been enjoying the holidays here at Fertile Source and will be returning to our normal publishing schedule on January 3rd. In the meantime, we’ve posted a new interview with Laure Baudot, author of “Luck,” which we published last November.
Monthly Archive for December, 2010
by Daniel Ruefman
When I sign the adoption papers
I linger in the black December
dying in decimeters.
I feel him lay curl bottomed
ear against my chest
I soothe, I coo, I kiss.
his Lilliputian digits
curl around my own and
soon our time is spent
and I leave this moment,
the father to son.
I’m sorry
I’m not sorry
as forever drops
the bottom of the mail bin.
When I stop hating myself
I hear a man
rattle his racket against
a chain link enclosure of the tennis courts;
I smell the perfume of charcoal
and fresh burst hotdogs;
I feel the earth beneath me,
the sour grass,
knotted between my fingers,
and I see him,
toddling down the path
at the water’s edge,
beneath the willows
idling by soccer pitch
rolling in the crab grass
chortling, screaming,
rising, waiting, falling
living
with the father I gave him.
When I graduate
I drink in this moment,
that moment
and taste a hundred thousand
this and that moments that led me
through the mean and the mild,
and I give thanks
for the season’s drink
for the dying moments
for the life I have
for the life I have given—
for the purpose loving
and letting go.
Daniel Ruefman is a Lecturer in the Writing and Linguistics Department at Georgia Southern University and has recently completed his Ph.D. in Composition and TESOL at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared in several journals, but most recently in The Tonopah Review, SLAB, and Temenos.
Please check out Tania Pryputniewicz’s interview with Daniel Ruefman, Unbroken Man: Poet Daniel Ruefman on Relinquishing a Child, the Deadbeat Father Myth, and Second Chances.
