John & John

For John Hibbard (second from left, back row), coach, dad and friend, and John Chase (far right, back row), my own coach and dad, in suburban heaven--tennis courts and cold beer forever.  

John & John

The line is violet, gold

in the light, the edge

of a snowdrift, ground glass

lifting in the wind,

settling into a shadowed border.

John crossed over

endlessly grinning,

spirogyra in his head,

tangled in years at a chain-link fence,

encouraging his daughter, her line drive or a drive

down the line.  Now he’s gone.

Gone to meet old friends,

another John,

my father.

Are they spinning

through their days

at that fence, drifting

to the tennis court—

their turn to play, to Saturday

doubles, in sweaty whites, moving

across green asphalt,

pale lines shifting—

a yellow ball tossed by a strong hand.

Let them rest now on a wooden bench.

Let them reach warm palms into a bucket

of ice. I hear them popping silver cans.

Why the name?

Be Merry and Wise is a stolen title. Once the name of an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan library in New York, it's now an out-of-print book that I can't afford (over $100). But it became a theme for me--that phrase--and a personal mantra. And it's tied into my hopes now, too. More on that later. Here's a description of the book from the Pierpont Morgan library's web page:
"When did someone decide that books might be written and published for child readers? Originating from an exhibition held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, this bibliographical study focuses on the child as the audience for books in the English language. The authors show how certain creative talents, driven by a sense of purpose, or a wish to make some money, attempted to appeal directly to children, and how the publishing industry came to realise that this audience might constitute a profitable market. As well as plotting the chronological development of children's book publishing, the authors also show how publishers adapted their strategies to exploit this new market. Sweetness and light did not prevail everywhere, but even in some of the most forbidding examples presented here there was a commercial optimism that both merriment and wisdom might be happily combined, within the pages of children's literature."