Today is my older son James's 32nd birthday. In my memory his birthdays were always sun-splashed, water-spraying, half-naked pagan-fests . . . high summer in the woods, the clearing dotted with capering cake-drunk children. He always did like a party.

In a little over a month, he's throwing his biggest one yet. The Wedding looms, but this morning I am thinking about my little roundhead, my firstborn: bent glasses, straw-colored hair, grubby-kneed, yackety-yack from morning till night. The most exhausting of toddlers, prying into every cupboard, climbing into every hole. But what a grin! . . . ear to ear, like a cartoon sun.

Ah, dear boy, dear boy. Here's the poem, written a couple of years ago, that I'm giving him for his wedding day.

Essay on Man

Dawn Potter

Today I found a crow feather, or it found me.
I was standing at the kitchen sink washing plates
when a flash caught my eye . . . a dark spin

through thick summer air, quill pointing down,
black crest held high, a slow-motion pirouette
from tree to earth. I ran outside to save it, as, above me,

crows jeered or cheered, and back in the kitchen
I cried out to my husband, “I found a feather!”
and he said, “Tell me the story.”

But what story?—for later, after he’d gone to work,
I realized, with shock, that the next day our older son would
turn twenty-nine. Yet we were twenty-nine when he was born,

so what is this anniversary? Our son’s birthday or ours?

I couldn’t stop puzzling over the oddness and meanwhile
I hung the laundry and I stirred a batch of ice cream,

and far away our son was living his last day as
twenty-eight, until suddenly the phone rang and
there he was, ready to chatter about repainting

his apartment and feeding a stray cat and, ugh,
what about those Republicans, and I was so happy
I forgot to tell him about my perplexity.

It was exactly like what life always is—
I think there’s a great momentous formal
complication and suddenly it morphs into diapers

and wailing and getting no sleep forever, and this
goes on and on for infinity until it’s over and then,
when the phone rings, my heart expands like

an accordion because there he is again,
one of three, the loves of my life—
the others being his brother and his father,

and the brother is canoeing in the Canadian
wilderness so won’t call and the father is framing
some rich person’s house so won’t call, but

thank god, thank god, I’ve got one of them
in my grasp, just for a moment—
I’ll tell this story to you, my love, my firstborn.

Once upon a time I got lost in the woods,
when we lived in the woods, and you three were
back in the house mucking around with your stuff—

but did you imagine me, crashing through the underbrush:
imagine me, imagining myself, as the night drew in: digging
into leafmold, covering my ears against the coyotes?

Or did you assume I’d be back soon, as I was,
quickly unlost, as if I’d never been gone,
as if I would always be there?

Today, though, the separation—it feels hard.
You are nearly twenty-nine, your brother nearly
twenty-five, you live so far away from me,

and I know nothing about your sleeping breath.
Here’s a story I don’t remember anymore—
what I felt like without you three. Who was I

before you were? Not that I don’t recall childhood
or being a teenager—but there must have been
a hole, there must have been an abyss—

for what would my life be now,
without always, always, missing you?