Blueberry Pie

The woodstove seemed to devour hardwood
this winter. We could not keep warm
when it was three degrees outside for a week.

My wife was concerned
because Abigail’s lips were blue.
No matter how many logs I jammed
into the stove, the poor girl’s lips were blue.

She seemed just fine
with her merry brown eyes
and red cheeks. She skipped
about the house and did not complain
of the cold. But we bundled her up
just the same.

It was a mystery, her blue lips
until late one afternoon
when the refrigerator door slammed.
“Alright,” my wife said,
“who ate the blueberry pie?”

Headless Barbies

for Lucy and Lily

“Daddy, can you put the head on this damn thing?”
my daughter says. She stands next to my desk
holding a smiling head of thick, platinum hair
in one hand, a chiffon-gowned body in the other.

“Honey, please don’t talk like that,” I say, knowing 
her frustration. I twist the hollow head of hair
onto the plastic stump of neck. My daughter thanks me
and runs off to join her twin sister in their room.

The twins turned five today. Curls of sun-bleached
blonde hair crown blue-eyed, smiling faces.
Tanned from the summer, they play dress-up
and wear princess gowns and my wife’s high heels.

They pull the heads off, not to harm the dolls,
but to change outfits. It’s easier to switch heads
than to work the buttons and elusive snaps
on dresses, blouses, or Barbara Eden pantaloons.

Pulling off a head beats guiding tiny sleeves
over plastic arms or pulling pedal pushers
over pointed toes always ready to receive high heels.
My wife and I stand by to twist on heads.

One minute you’re a blonde with blue eyes,
in a crimson gown, then pop, and you have freckles,
red hair, and green eyes. And the dolls, through it all,
never lose their smiles, their unblinking happiness.

The dozen or so dolls, for the most part naked,
headless torsos with perfect breasts and legs,
are aesthetically challenged by swivel hips
and legs that show the lines of ball and socket joints.

Nevertheless, they lie in an oval, green suitcase,
outstretched arms and hands ever beckoning,
as the twins, at ease among torsos, mix and match
from an array of gowns and bodiless heads of hair.

Though dolls in a doll’s world, the twins erupt
into savagery, at times, and wrestle for gowns or heads.
Sweet as they are, they bite each other and pull hair.
Their Solomon, I stand by ready to arbitrate—

as I will in years to come when their adolescent bodies 
are unacceptable to themselves, their hair, their clothes
are never quite right. I look into the dark without blinking,
and practice smiles plastic and vacuous as space.

Texting with a Teen

for Dylan

“fu—to erase, to take back, to make into nothing”
—Judy Halebsky from “How to Find a Man up to the Task”

I told the poet, after her reading,
“Now I know what my son means
when he texts ‘FU’ to me.” It’s tough
to follow the shortcut language of teens.
I am glad to have discovered,
in Japanese symbols, how to relate to my son.

Take last week when I texted him
to mow the lawn. His response—WTF—
made me think he was suggesting a day:
Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. 
I responded: “Today.” He said “OMG.”
He texted that he was playing X-Box.

Years ago, I lost my first son
to real-time, online war games.
We’d had a few years of chess,
but my level of commitment waned
when we moved to hand-held controllers.

I asked son number two when he would be done
on X-Box. “IDK,” he said. “Mow before dark,”
I said. He texted “whatever,” and probably did it
without looking at the keys on his cell phone.

My sons play war games together across the world.
The first one, a sailor, is in Tokyo on a ship.
Son two is in our basement in West Virginia.
They use headphones and converse 
while they massacre each other’s armies 
in an Internet war room on X-Box. 

IDK, maybe I need to loosen up. As a kid,
I’d stand up plastic soldiers and shoot them down
with rubber bands. The thrill was there,
but not the technology. No, I think it’s too late 
to join that fight. Chess, anyone?

Parallel Parking in December

for Meredith

She is determined to master this,
to take the driving test next week.
Her reasons are ambiguous. Sharing
this grown-up skill brings her closer to us,
yet she feels free to slam the door,
to mutter how stupid and selfish we are,
to leave us behind, to take wing.

It’s freezing. I stand in overcoat and gloves
near two plastic, oversized trash cans
I’ve set up as markers. My toes are ice cubes.
She practices backing with “S” turns
between the cans in the used car
we bought for her. She glowers at me
when I say she is about to climb the curb.

Some of her friends failed on their first try.
This is our only chance to practice
before heavy snow forecast for this evening.
The trees around our house are bare,
their limbs black and gray stick figures 
against a white sheet of sky.

Canada geese overhead fly in a curving string.
Their honking gets louder and brings life
to the blank sky, then trails off as they move
over the trees and away from us.

I turn back at the honking
of my daughter’s car. In her anxious face,
I see she’s struggling, trying to read in mine
whether I think she’s close enough
or too far away.

Hornet Nest

for Ryan

My college-aged son and I are
two bucks. Our chests touching, we
catch our horns on chandeliers, in coat hangers.
When I’m home, he stays clear of my grazing area.
When I’m gone, he becomes me. When we talk, my
temples sting. Once, on the Appalachian Trail, we agreed.
He was ten. We hiked a lot then—with rock hammers. We
picked up quartz or granite from the trail, chipped it, put
samples in our knapsacks. Keeping up meant following
him across boulders, into caves, to side paths, always
behind, hearing—never seeing—frogs plopping
into ponds, startled turkeys flapping for takeoff,
the thrash of leaves as foxes ran, the shrieks of
pileated woodpeckers. That one time, he had
stopped to wait near a tree-hung hornet nest.
Big as an urn, it was a perfect target. Though
stung by conscience, I seized a chunk of
quartz, threw it, but missed wide. My son,
the accomplice, chipped granite into
throwable pieces. The hornets, at
every hit, clouded the sky. We
kept it up, my son seeing,
at last, his father. The
hornets, unimpressed,
swore: “Once you
lock on, sting
the hell out
of them.”

Frankensteina

for Beth

She’s on the deck pouring potting soil
into containers. Without her careful,
persistent replenishing of plants each spring,
our yard would lack its beauty. She’s made it
for fourteen years since the breast cancer.

She has Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD)
in her swollen right hand. She’ll possibly
overdo it and need to sleep for a couple of days.
The cancer meds have taken their toll:
hair and bone loss, sleep disorder, anxiety.

She’s had meniscus surgery and has plans
for another operation for shoulder joint pain.
She adjusts her temporary front tooth.
We have six children. How could we
have made it without her?

She calls herself Frankensteina and notes
the new body parts: cadaver bones, screws
and plates from spinal surgery; a bilateral
silicone implant from breast surgery,
and hearing aids.

She’s had cataract surgery on both eyes
and is hobbling on painful knee joints across
the deck tending to her tulips, daffodils
and irises. She pulls the hose behind her
and sprays life on the plants and all of us.

© Copyright Tom Donlon, all rights reserved.
Tom Donlon photo by Meredith Donlon
Poems previously published and used here by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com