The Two of Them

A while back a friend asked if I ever wrote about my children. This is a piece I wrote on September 30, 1995. Miranda was 4 and a half then, and Nicholas just barely 2.

They have brought me to the sharpest edge of the mouth of the canyon,
laughing and singing and dancing all the way,
to the place where I could fall off and disappear —
evaporating from exhaustion.

So different and yet so similarly silly,
just when I know that the last nerve left in my body is dangling by a thread,
they send me off in stitches with a look,
a face that should be painted by an artist of the Renaissance
for an image of cherubic naughtiness.

They are conspirators
so different in temperament and visage
that they elucidate the individuality of the spirit.

I know it’s bedtime
by the heaviness of my head and eyelids;
and still they shout and run and wrestle,
and still they need and whimper and pout,
and still they rustle and chatter and yell;

and they tell me a hundred thousand times that I am wrong,
that the darkened world and hushed city are lies,
and that they can trip the light fantastic if they want to —
they win; they can; they do.

The Princess of the Moods and the Prince of Serenity
slap and hug and laugh their belly laughs
heedless of the world around them,
not once seeing the hollow eyes of she who cannot keep her head up,
the Ogre of Bedtime,
sworn enemy of fun and fights and crankiness and joy,
of all that makes the nighttime sing of adventure and life.

Yet were I to leave them to their own devices;
if I went off somewhere and let them beat the drums of play,
I would return to find their played-out angel bodies
sleeping their untrammeled sleep.