Vox Populi
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Tony Magistrale: Family Man
Walking across Delaware Avenue to the Statler Hotel
for a meeting or to sign important papers
(how important are any of them now?)
pulling his coat together with one hand,
holding on to his fedora with the other,
headlong into Lake Erie white wind
as specks of ice fling themselves between office buildings,
another interminable winter of slush
and burnt snow, Buffalo skies the ashen gray of death.
Each Christmas Eve I would meet him
downtown. We would drink expensive red wine
until December darkness drove us out into it
and talk turned sentimental.
Toughest trial lawyer I ever saw work a courtroom
had to wipe away tears
whenever he heard the song White Christmas.
For forty years a compliant prisoner
in his own home. Work his addiction and escape,
his only refuge against the daily humiliations,
the tedious boredom, the inane dinner chatter.
He used to tell me someone is going
to have to die first before anything can change.
And I wondered where was that trial lawyer
in the face of such protracted misery?
Back then, a man just didn’t disappear,
up and leave his family on their own.
He tried to explain this to me every time
I would ask, but that was before I understood
anything about being a family man.
~~~~
Copyright 2026 Anthony Magistrale. This poem first appeared in Cultural Daily.
Anthony Magistrale is known primarily as a biographer of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. Magistrale has worked as an English professor at the University of Vermont since 1983, receiving the Literary Laundry’s Award of Distinction in 2011 for his poetry
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Heartbreaking
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What a heartbreaking portrait of this man — so masterfully described through the first stanza’s weather metaphor. Reading this poem I kept thinking: Yes, I know this guy. Those tears held back, held back, held back…until a Christmas song, each year, finally let them flow. I love this poem.
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Yes, it is heart-breaking the way that professional life destroys the emotional life of men, and increasingly, women.
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I love this Winter-driven memoir, and Anthony’s remembrance of Breughel’s painting as well. It is the human heart that can work as well to warm this world. We mustn’t forget that other power of being as we despair of the ever present force of Frost’s: “Should it have to perish twice…”
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I grew up with men like this: competent successful professionals who disliked their families, but nevertheless, were committed to staying with them. I tried to be a different kind of man…
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Thanks heavens for all of us you sure succeeded, dear Michael!
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. I am clearly a work-in-progress!
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