The Work

Saturday afternoons when I accompanied my father
on his weekend errands, he would dial the dashboard

radio to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera
where a man with a mid-Atlantic accent explained

the grief of human calamity set to song. When traffic
snarled and a soprano lamented how she gave her

life to art while her lover was tortured just off stage,
my father would stare at the long avenues ahead,

and one day he told me he’d taken singing lessons
but the road did not go where he had hoped and fate

always plays a hand in what we are, though we sing
when no one listens about how it could be different.