*
DeWitt Henry’s recent prose collection, Endings & Beginnings: Family Essays (MadHat Press, 2021), was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, 2022. His first poetry collection, Foundlings, is available from Life Before Man/Gazebo Books in September, 2022, and his second collection, Restless For Words: Poems, in November from Finishing Line Press. He was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College. Details at www.dewitthenry.com.

PRATFALLS

DeWitt Henry

Your middle brother
promised to catch you.
He’d practiced himself
with your oldest brother.

Remember? Stand straight,
face him. Hands at sides.
Shoulders back. Tuck chin.
lean forward, like a board.
Don’t catch yourself or step.
No hands out. Just topple.

You try, but take a saving step.
“Don’t worry. We’ll try it again!
I’ll catch you. Promise.”

You do, this time. He does:
inches from the ground.

We made an act of it.
Not only on backyard grass,
or rug inside, but on
our swimming club’s cement,
while others stared.

That’s love, he said.
That’s faith.

(That’s life, I think now,
both for clowns and
children of alcoholics.)

CLIMATE CHANGE

if the frame of that heavenly arch…
over us should loosen and dissolve itself

if celestial spheres should forget
their wonted motions…, turn themselves
any way as it might happen

if the prince of the lights of heaven
which now as a giant
doth run his unwearied course
should as it were through
a languishing faintness
begin to stand and to rest himself

if the moon should wander
from her beaten way,
the times and seasons of the year
bend themselves
by disordered and confused mixture

the winds breathe out their last gasp,
the clouds yield no rain
the earth be defeated of heavenly influence,

the fruits of the earth pine away
as children at the withered breasts
of their mother…

what would become of man himself,
whom these things now do all serve?

— DeWitt Henry