Turned Four

By Richard Wehrenberg, Jr.

Oh, dad who stays after school 
on the children’s house playground
sporting athletic shorts and goofy grins
chasing the kids around sprinting 

up the slide turning on dimes with
meaty calves and crew-cut normalcy
crawling through plastic tubes standing
czarist on mini-picnic tables picking kids
out of wooden play towers like apples— 

what is it that has made you? 

I just really notice the difference, between, 
you know, a four and five year old, it’s so obvious. 

Yes, of course, but could you explain to me please,
all the things we never get answers for, all the impossible
actions, all the inscrutable provenance that manifests
on our faces as frowns, on our shoulders as shrugs? 

I wholeheartedly believe a four year old, who I begin
to admonish for pulling a three year old’s hair,
when he says, I don’t, I don’t know why I did it. 

And I almost want to believe you, dad who stays
after school, when you tell me about your life,
about the truths you have found about things 

about how becoming old is like 
a grey cloud growing greyer 

about how we must hide what we mean 
to say in swaddles of deferment, 
in cloaks of cloth, under 
masks of more masks 

and I understand, believe you me, 
I know, but I can’t, I just can’t 
let me let me see in that way. 

I keep hearing little Eliza, 
her boundless brown eyes and 
tacked together midwestern diction, 
elfin hands moving in solidarity 
with her words under the slide, 
charming and sincere with the 
girls she has come to call her friends— 

When I turned four, it, guys, it didn’t feel 
like it, it felt like I was still three.