Custody

Every other weekend they go to their mother's.
Some Tuesdays or Wednesdays they spend the night.
She takes them for two weeks in the summer.
We divvy up the holidays. Otherwise
they live here with me. We agreed to this
after months of court-appointed enmity
during most of which we behaved like children.
In the end, I was 'awarded custody' -
a legalese to make it sound like winning -
pancakes and carpools and the dead of nights
with nightmares or earaches or wet bedlinen.
Their mother got what's called her visitation rights -
a kind of catch-up-ball she plays with gifts
and fast-food dinners-out and talk of trips
to Disneyworld in the sparkling future.
They were ten, nine, six, and four when it happened.
I played their ages in the Lotto for awhile.
I never won. They were, of course, the prize.
They were, likewise, the ones, when we were through
with all that hateful paperwork and ballyhoo,
who seemed like prisoners of care and keeping
and settled into their perplexed routines
like criminals or parties to a grief --
accomplices in love and sundering.


Thomas Lynch, Grimalkin and other poems (Jonathan Cape 1994)