I love my books just like a brother.
I wish that they could read each other.

My endeavors were not only in the form of couplets, but the fewer lines I quote the better: On “Toast,” I provided:

It feels so good to be
Extremely buttery.

Andrew understood that I sat in my chair each morning “to write poetry”—and when I had written him his daily poem he mounted the stairs to his bedroom apparently satisfied.

Every night I made up stories for him, and later for his sister too. Once Andrew brought me a story himself, telling me that he had a good idea but it was scary. He was going to walk down to the lion store, buy a lion seed, and grow a lion in the window where his mother raised houseplants. Thus I wrote my first children’s book, Andrew the Lion Farmer, with due credit and a flap picture of father tying son’s shoe. Andrew was pleased. As he grew up at school he was proud of my notoriety, and enjoyed the parade of poet-visitors who came to the house—James Wright, Robert Bly, W. D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder; poetry was obviously what adult males did: When he was seven or eight, he asked how old he needed to be, before he went to poetry school.

Andrew went to mathematics school. He completed studies for his Ph.D., except for the dissertation, at which point he decided that, if he were not going to solve unified field theory, he would work in business. He directs quantitative research for a large firm that sells mutual funds, and he has a vocation for fatherhood. Meanwhile, his sister with her two daughters is the best mother I have ever witnessed. All four parents are exemplary. I remind myself that I was not the best father. Although I parted from them little, when I still lived at the house—gone perhaps two nights a month on poetry readings—and although I was home more than most fathers, spending only thirteen or fourteen hours a week at the university, I stayed home to work. My daughter was intensely gregarious, always playing with other children, and we found our intimacies over book-reading and bedtime, which became my precinct. But my son was often as solitary as I had been as an only child. Because I was impatient to write and read, I did not play catch with him as much as I might have done.

When my son was thirteen and my daughter eight, their mother and I separated and two years later divorced. I spent five years between marriages, a wretched time; I stayed in Ann Arbor because of my children, although I could have left for a job at another university or for the poetry chair at the Library of Congress. I spent Mondays after school through supper with both my children; then each of them came overnight once a week. When I was with them then, in those brief hours, I did not work. Still, work was an issue; for a decade when they were in their teens and twenties, their first words and my answer were always the same. They would ask, “What have you been doing?”—and each time I would answer, as if it were something I had just discovered, “Working!” It became a joke; we no longer perform the joke.