"Pause"

I was a stay-at-home Dad from the time Grace was born until Janice and I divorced. I think it mattered; I believe it was the best choice to make.

The phone rang one afternoon in 1991. It was Eve Richardson. Eve had been reading The New Yorker, and had found a poem compelling. "I was reading it, and enjoying it, and relating to the writer, when it occurred to me, 'this is Older Holden!' I'm mailing it to you now." Eve was right.

I pasted the poem (which she had cut from the magazine) on an index card, and kept it at my desk. I read it to Benny Andrews when he came to visit. I have mailed it to closest friends through the years. Many are surprised that I am not the author.

As you read it, I hope that you will work to get the phrasing. The guy has a moment of zen consciousness as he goes about his routine. I recite it aloud, alone in my house, from time-to-time, then go to my front door and experience all my Lauralove anew, amid the echoes of the live voice of her filling every crack.

The poem was written by Eamon Grennan, who teaches at Radcliffe. I've had a nice correspondence with him. His daughter's name is Keira.


Pause


The weird containing stillness of the neighborhood
just before the school bus brings the neighborhood kids
home in the middle of the cold afternoon: a moment of pure
waiting, anticipation, before the outbreak of anything,
when everything seems just, seems justified, hanging
in the wings, about to happen, and in your mind you see
the flashing lights flare amber to scarlet, and your daughter
in her blue jacket and white-fringed sapphire hat
stepping gingerly down and out into our world again, to hurry
through silence and snow-grass, as the door sighs shut
and her own front door flies open, and she finds you
behind it, father-in-waiting, the stillness in bits
and the common world restored as you bend to touch her,
to take her hat and coat up from the floor
where she's dropped them, hear the live voice of her filling
every crack. In the pause before all this happens, you know
something about the life you've chosen to live
between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that
explosion of things as they are - those vast unanswerable
intrusions of love and disaster, or just the casual scatter
of your child's winter clothes on the hall floor.