Order

I hear you wake before I’m up myself
and snap to ready now before my eyes
crack from their crud to face your face today.
I hear you blunder toward my door. I hear

you crash it wide. The loosened hinges shiver
their frame, and now the house itself, awake
to the world and you, complicit, pulls me hard
as thunder from my sleep. You beat the echoes

to me, blear-faced, awash with night sweat; 
you drag a bunny by the ears to bed
and tumble graceless up the mattress, silent,
a drowsy rocket wanting, wanting something

I’m not awake enough to understand
but will be, soon, my son, and then we’ll go
to blaze the day, to stomp each puddle left
by the rain you never notice as you pull

me into the world, all leap and bowl, all grab
and fall. Today I’ll wake up better, call
the distance order, order it to be
a smaller thing. I’ll stand to make it so.

Copyright © 2021 by Dan Rosenberg. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 2, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“As a father, I sometimes surrender into the comfort of pretending certainty, of asserting an order to the wild world. So this poem arose from my waking up to the importance and impotence of that fantasy. It also aims for a poetics of engaged fatherhood, of fathering as a way of life that is at the core of mine.”
—Dan Rosenberg