Wait for Me

By: Paul Doty

Amongst the many poems in a binding-split notebook is a last word

a final line, an end. Seek a metaphor for raising sons and it’s a rubber

soul worn off the vinyl, bald sneakers, long grooves walked, which,

are, well, walked. Seated revolt, glass of beer crystal ball in hand

looking backwards on accelerating time wanting to explain wait.

Hall and Oates singing “Wait for Me” on the car radio driving north

from Chesire County New Hampshire as coda to a daughter laughing

with her half-brothers redirecting a radio moment into tear ducts.

The automobile as American metaphor, American fatherhood metaphor,

accelerated providing, but solitary driving the road pointing to Joad

and Johnny Cash an audible exclamation in an empty car, wait for me.

Analogue fatherhood, grateful adult children, the boy’s stepmother and

I in each other’s arms spinning the engineered symmetry of all

gone wrong and right and haunted by a nervous wish to back the car up,

to play the record backwards.

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Paul Doty is the Special Collections and Archives Librarian at St. Lawrence University. He and his wife Agnes live in Canton New York, and they have four adult children. Paul has published poems with Cathexis Northwest Press, Twin Bill, Shot Glass, Nerve Cowboy, and the Mississippi Review.