Sol Books Upper Midwest Writers Series selection

My Father's Gloves touches on that most conflicted of family bonds, the one between fathers and sons. With a hauntingly painful voice, Spiering explores the burdensome yoke of a father's expectations and the struggles a son must face as he grows into manhood. His poems are accessible and wrought with emotions, his descriptions subtle in their complexity, and his pace slow yet deliberate.    

My Father & Dylan Thomas

as a teenager
I paged through
Time Magazine
coming to a photo

of Dylan Thomas
rail sitting
at the White Horse
Tavern. I said

to my father,
"who's Dylan Thomas?"
he said, "a bad
man and a drunk."

I went to the library
to learn about
Dylan Thomas; after
reading poems, journals,

notebooks, and a biography,
I told my father
I wanted to be
just like Dylan Thomas.

  

My Father's Gloves

I wonder if his hands are still
crossed in the coffin
after ten years dead; a second
dead is as good as million years —
snuff out the stars;
I wear his leather dress gloves
everyday as I walk through the freezing
rain, carrying my ancestor's
cells in my fingertips,
in my groin, and beneath my toenails
but my life has wrinkled the gloves
that his pensiveness kept new;
I own them for one week and they're rumpled
from rough use — my bear-rolling hills,
risk taking, and searching out the sky's
ladder that I know is there to find.

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