I WAS rooting around this weekend for a poem to post on Father’s Day and, as I was meditating on this, I remembered a verse I once read by the modern poet Anthony Hecht about divorced fathers hanging out in Central Park with their children on Saturdays. I looked it up. Reading it again was unbearably sad, as sad as it was the first time. Obama did not speak of these fathers in his proclamation this weekend.

The experiences of the men I have known who have been unwilling participants in divorce have changed my life. I cannot quite explain why this phenomenon has affected me more than it has others. These are terrible injustices, some of the greatest instances of injustice I have personally encountered, but I know many people who are entirely unmoved. 

These men are not perfect people.  But most of them are not more imperfect than, say, I am. Not a single one of them committed adultery; they were all tried and convicted on the grounds of insensitivity. “The punishment is incommensurate to the crime.” I have said that many times. I have said that to friends and family members. Whatever flaws they had as husbands, these men did not deserve the exile they received. (The same, of course, can be said of many women who have been left under no-fault divorce. I just don’t know many women who fall into this category.)

These men are not whiny people, although some have been occasionally enraged. They are loving fathers, and they have all, with one exception, worked hard to stay involved in their childrens’ lives despite rejection by their childrens’ mothers. Those who are rich have found it easy to remarry if they wanted. Those who are poor, less so.

I live next door to a divorced father who inhabits a world of fairly extreme solitude. I chat with him when he mows and weeds his yard and have watched him go from a middle-aged man to an old man, alone. I do not know many of the details of his past, except that he has four children. I am also certain from talking to him that his wife left him. He is a kind and decent person and after a career as an engineer of some kind, he is relatively poor. Another divorced father, in the category of the enraged, lives up the street and soon after he introduced himself, he revealed the facts of his wife’s sudden departure. A soon-to-be divorced father lives down the street. Then around the corner is… Well, you see, it goes on and on. All were left; all have survived. But they constitute a subculture that cannot last. Any society that does this to its fathers does not deserve to survive.

Here is Hecht’s poem, Circles, which is far too sad to post on Father’s Day:

Long inventories of miseries unspoken,
Appointment books of pain,
Attars of love gone rancid, the picture broken
At the fountain, rooted unkindnesses:
All were implied by her, by me suspected,
At her saying, “I could not bear
Ever returning to that village in Maine.
For me the very air,
The harbor smells, the hills, all are infected.”

I gave my sympathy, filled in the blanks
With lazy, bitter fictions,
And, feeling nothing, won her grateful thanks. 

Many long years and some attachments later
I was to be instructed by the courts
Upon the nicest points of such afflictions,
Having become a weakened, weekend father.
All of us, in our own circle of hell
(Not that of forger, simonist or pander),
Patrolled the Olmsted bosks of Central Park,
Its children-thronged resorts,
Pain-tainted ground,
Where the innocent and the fallen join to play
In the fields, if not of the Lord, then of the Law;
Which decreed that love be hobbled and confined
To Saturday,
Trailing off until Sunday-before-dark;
And certain sand pits, slides, swings, monkey bars
Became the old thumbscrews of spoiled affection
And agonized aversion.
Of these, the most tormenting
In its single-songed, maddening monotony,
Its glaring-eyed and nostril-flaring steeds
With perfect teeth, but destined never to win
Their countless and interminable races,
Was the merry, garish, mirthless, carousel.

The “forger, simonist or pander” is a reference to the sinners in the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

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