Reading before we read, Horoscope and Weather

My father laughing over the morning paper
Where the written world fell open on the funnies,
Manic sports, stalled politics … and where
The Horoscope said, “now,” the Forecast, “sunny,”

He couldn’t laugh enough, so skipped a page,
Then another, till the back door shut,
An engine turned, and I woke up his age
In the mirror of a gray no scissors cut.

He backed out of his pulling in at night
As light elbowed past an opened door, failing
Down six empty steps. Now a wall-switch bites
Blue sparks before the neon’s billowing

Over another kitchen’s white-on-white
Enameling; and now the sun is up
And climbing through the windows to a height
I follow out and off beyond the steep

Fence and trees to where the sky cuts flat
And blank as the paper spread in front of him,
My father then, waiting till I’d padded in, pulled out
My chair, inched up, and yawned that he begin.

Nothing is as funny now as then.
Still, when they rumple in, they bring his eyes
And mine, squinting and wet with laughing
Over the cracked, cracked up, sidewise, unwise

Stories that I read to them, telling how
We bend, break, wires shorting, knotting and strange;
Never as the Horoscope’s predicted “now,”
But as the weather comes, fresh and ignorant of change.

A Message from the Editors

Support our crucial work and join us in strengthening the bonds of civilization.

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

Show your support

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 Number 1, on page 41
Copyright © 2023 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/9/reading-before-we-read-horoscope-and-weather