On a Son Turning Twenty-One

I have watched him, back from illness,

  skating at a hockey rink,

round and round the face-off circle,

  lost in himself, it made me think--

 

 

long after the others had left the ice

  and the Zamboni man had honked his horn--

there was within him a manic will,
  a restless soul struggling to be born.

 

 

I stood with him in the onyx waters

  off the beach at Osterville,

as he tumbled beneath the surface, turning

  somersaults as if he breathed by gills.

 

It is these moments, like waking dreams,

  a sleepwalking through the visible world,

that call to mind my innocence

  of money and men and place and girls.

 

 

 

We have within us the blood of Celts

  McGillicuddys and O'Keefes

just a few generations back.

  Diluted now, a quarter in me

 

an eighth in him.  The rest is Scots,

  people for whom a taste is enough

and a lyric's as rare as a dragon

  or a poet named MacDuff.

 

            May you put down your cup when done
              And drink a glass of water,
            unlike, let's say, the bootless man
              who married your grandfather's daughter.