Wayward Son

My father moved through dooms of love,
his first wife died giving birth
to a stillborn child.

He had a son with his second wife,
my father was fifty; she was in her forties,
the son died at seventeen, motorcycle accident.

In his sixties he married
a young girl of twenty-four,
fathered a daughter, and continues to linger

in the desert of Indio
by loaves of bread and fish
in the murky waters of Salton Sea.

My father moved through dooms of love,
but two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and I, I took the unfrosted one.