The Bearing Edge
For DJ
My son starts every conversation
with the statement “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, Dad. What’s for dinner tonight?”
“I love you, Dad. Is it supposed to rain?”
“I love you, Dad. Can we go for a walk?”
“I love you, Dad, but you really have to chill.”
He’s like the guy who wears a bow tie
to the bar and to the beach.
He’s a dandy of affection, at once
rolling up his pennies and spending them
on ice cream. He’ll wear this phrase
to heaven (he’s already been to hell—
what he calls fostercareless). If
Orpheus had a lyre, then he has a bearing
edge. He will not drum without it:
“I love you, Dad.”
He moves forward by glancing back,
and no one is ever lost.
The sky sells cotton candy;
the trees, shade.
Love—it’s a kind of leash, invisible,
expanding, and I’m his big, happy dog.
Copyright © 2023 by Ralph James Savarese. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 26, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Adoption is often presented as the last resort of a desperate couple. No one would choose to adopt if they could have their own children, and certainly no one would choose a so-called ‘damaged’ child. I wanted to unseat this logic, and I found in my son’s refrain a kind of glorious drumbeat where the horror of the past gives way to the promise of the future. When I remembered the term for the rim of a drum’s shell, ‘the bearing edge,’ I knew that I had a pun I could work with.”
—Ralph James Savarese
Ralph James Savarese
Ralph James Savarese is the author of When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems (Ice Cube Press, 2020). He is a professor of English at Grinnell College in Iowa.