I Wish

Another dead child
in the news and again I
think rise up out
of the water, water lilies
pouring over my shoulders
like fire, and
even if the man is dead
now, a suicide, hanging
himself in fact,
the part of me rising
from under water wants to
kill him, truly, for
what was in his eyes
when his eyes snagged
mine to push them back
under. Me a boy,
in the water,
him a drunk on a
pier — watching me
drown, my eyes begging
him, his loving this better
than sex if the eyes
were to be believed.
My father ran down
from the bunkhouse,
how did he know? and
snagged me with
a boat oar, my miraculous
father,
who did not swear,
called that son
of a bitch a son of a bitch
and rummy.
The guy was gangly,
loose in the knees and
elbows, a great tap dancer at
parties. There he was
on the pier,
loose as tap dancer,
not even splashing his highball.
“Hey, the kid can
swim, the kid’s just
foolin’ around, what’s
the big deal?” Nowadays
I see
the school picture of another
one in the paper and I say,
“I know
what the eyes
were, I know what the last
eyes you ever saw
said to you.” And
now, old and foolish, I go on
wishing for them all
that some miracle father
like mine had come
down from the bunkhouse
for every one of them.

--Jim Hazard

I know of Jim Hazard through my late friend, James Liddy. They were both English professors at UW - Milwaukee. According to the Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective, "Jim Hazard was raised in Whiting, Indiana, for which he is grateful to any god anyone can dream up. In Lake County, Indiana, he worked in #3 Open Hearth of Inland Steel Company as a common laborer, also was a hod carrier, a mailman in a research laboratory, a runner for a bookie, and a trumpet player. He graduated from Northwestern University and then University of Connecticut. He published several books and chapbooks of poems between l961 and l985 and then took a leave of absence from writing poems. From 1985 until just recently (when he began writing poems again) he wrote (and still writes) non-fiction, mostly for Milwaukee Magazine, but also for Jazz Times, The Milwaukee Journal, The Onion, and others. He also published fiction in Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Richmond Review (U.K.), and others. He is a retired school teacher and currently plays second cornet with the Milwaukee Golden Eagle Concert Band."

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