It’s one of those sunny winter days,
cold but not too cold.
The trees look regal,
the crows bounce around,
almost cheery.
It also happens to be Sunday
so the urgency to be
out there
is loud in my head
in a way that is partly
my own desire
and partly a baggy sense
of duty to do what
good humans do.
But my two-year-old has a cold
and my five-year-old cried
for a long time because
his dad played the guitar
“on top of my talking’
and suddenly
Madagascar 2 is on
and the sun has set.
But I’ve decided not to feel sludgy
because joy does not discriminate
against inside air.
And if you’d been there
when my son called my cell phone
from the dining room
to ask me if I could tell him more often
that he’s good
you’d have seen that
the hug that came next
was a landscape
so beautiful
a painter would have
ceded defeat.