Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
–Robert Hayden
Wasps
First he yelped, and then my father sprinted
the length of the tenth hole at Southern Pines
backwards, green to tee, trailing a loud plume
of wasps, slapping himself, jockey and horse.
It took more than four hundred yards before
the last vendetta wasp that had not stung
him veered off and flew back to base. We trudged
warily back to the tenth green, of course,
and putted out, then finished the back nine
while surly welts bloomed on his neck and arms.
“They’re not individuals,” he complained.
What was I to golf, or golf to me?
I played to keep my father’s company.
“They’re cells. The nest is the real animal.”
I pictured their papery cone and tried
to think what the dark surge wasps passed from each
to each inside might be except the fierce
electricity of state, or family.
–William Matthews
