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In Canada, on a dark afternoon, from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory I saw your two clenched fists in a tree— your most recent rage—until I came to my senses, and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected through a window onto the maple leaves. Was it simply that I had stolen away in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday, twelve years after your death, and you less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box? It is late August in the moral North. To answer your first question, I obey the fish and game laws of New York State, Ontario and Quebec. The odd branch has already turned red. As for me I have turned inside out, I cry for revolution against myself— no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray, you, less than a thumb print on a page. Matters still outstanding: you will not remember— a boy, I cut school, sneaked out to the 42nd Street library to read among readers like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride. I have kept your Greek grammar, your 78 revolutions per minute recording of Rossini’s Barber you played to stop me from crying, almost my first memory. Your “valuable papers,” now valuable only to me, I fed to a fire years ago. Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead every day, and carrying you on my back, out of the burning city, in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud. Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain where God in his divine humor tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son, and she asks laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?” Take one foot, then the other … Imitate a departure if you make it not, and each going will lend a kind of easiness to the next. Father, you poisoned my father. I am standing alone, telling the truth as you commanded. (Without too many of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.) You, less than a seed of a wild grape. Today, in the last moments of light I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water. As I sing my song of how you will be remembered, if I could out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast and stuff your ears with wax. I regret some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father, do not forget your 18 inch Board of Education ruler on which I measured my penis, marking its progress. You kept it on your desk before you till your old age. One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile I wore on my face through boyhood. I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.

Consider the adhesiveness of things to the ghosts that prized them, the "olden days" of birthday spoons and silver napkin rings. Too carelessly I opened that velvet drawer of heirlooms. There lay my grandmother's soul begging under veils of tarnish to be brought back whole. She who was always a climate in herself, who refused to vanish as the nineteen-hundreds grew older and louder, and the wars worse, and her grandchildren, bigger and ruder in her daughter's house. How completely turned around her lavender world became, how upside down. And how much, under her "flyaway" hair, she must have suffered, sitting there ignored by the dinner guests hour after candlelit hour, rubbed out, like her initials on the silverware, eating little, passing bread, until the wine's flood, the smoke's blast, the thunderous guffaws at last roared her to bed. In her tiny garden of confidence, wasted she felt, and furious. She fled to church, but Baby Jesus had grown out of his manger. She read of Jews in the New Haven Register gassed or buried alive. Every night, at the wheel of an ambulance, she drove and drove, not knowing how to drive. She died in '55, paralyzed, helpless. Her no man's land survived. I light my own age with a spill from her distress. And there it is, her dream, my heirloom, my drive downhill at the wheel of the last bus, the siren's wail, the smoke, the sickly smell. The drawer won't shut again. It never will.

I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches Losing what little the frost had left them to hold. I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows, Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold. They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless; Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds. Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering, Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words. Too great for my blundering comfort, your anguish confused me. From a great distance, I saw you standing alone. Frozen and stark, in a black iron circle of silence, I could not pity your pain; I could scarcely pity my own.

Each time the babies came I knew they would be gone by morning. Bright as bulbs turned out of beds, hard and full of promise. Bodies on the brink of unfolding. I could not hold them and I could not hold them long enough. It was a sin to let them in. I did not expect them to stay. I did not expect their forgiveness when I turned away.

The poetry’s arrested in his scene, which can’t be trusted, because I saw it through painkillers that softened my head, after I’d asked him what Keats really meant: “Was it a vision or a waking dream?” —You think that really mattered much to him? In my waking vision dream, there’s no glory, no prize committee or dew-drip Paradise. He’s in an attic nook, or dim garage, or the cellar where he actually writes, the space a sheeted granulated matter, his silenced countenance and de-boned body scabby with caked ash about to crust and crack, poems piled at his feet like shoeshine rags. A grave purpled fraughtness colors him. What damaged him to this silence? He still writes and still isn’t heard, as if not being heard is the whole point of it, and who are these children, these waving Halloween windsocks who won’t talk to him? Beyond my busybody vision, he staggers through divorce, stooped, bereft, still writing. Spiky and singing, he out-writes them all, the cheered, spotless others—he howls at their after-dinner-speaker poetry, the monsignors, the suburbans, the woo-woo wisdom merchants weeping to the bank. Poetry’s a weather that doesn’t need a specific place: it’s a storm outside a cellar, sunshine at a bedroom window. Too much schoolroom poisons the idiom. Too much reverence stinks up the joint. The sorrow hanging in the dreamy air seems to confuse him, he can’t understand how his heart came to hurt him like this, confuses it with leaves blurted out by storms, leaves that keep falling fast in the cellar, in poems he writes, the base desires and rage, he says the gods designed the set, stage-manage things, scripted them, the hilarity that hurts us is that none of it really matters, that poetry’s griefs are intimates we don’t choose. They come to us, for us. They cling to body and soul.

Stairs & rites not for the foot The building thinks Angular rock Green skyscraper Black ziggurat Miniature of time Made into altar Invention of the night Sprouting at dawn Carved rock praying as it buds Seeking the seed to sprout! Saliva in torrents Cooling waterfall You redeem your field Salt head Stream of lights Double reflection Stone & water The same sprouting

The thing about the dove was how he cried in my pocket and stuck his nose out just enough to breathe some air and get some snow in his eye and he would have snuggled in but I was afraid and brought him into the house so he could shit on the New York Times, still I had to kiss him after a minute, I put my lips to his beak and he knew what he was doing, he stretched his neck and touched me with his open mouth, lifting his wings a little and readjusting his legs, loving his own prettiness, and I just sang from one of my stupid songs from one of my vile decades, the way I do, I have to admit it was something from trains. I knew he’d like that, resting in the coal car, slightly dusted with mountain snow, somewhere near Altoona, the horseshoe curve he knew so well, his own moan matching the train’s, a radio playing the Inkspots, the engineer roaring.

Because you were born with your knees tied together under you you are bound to need your hands and resent my knees. Because you were born with and without knees your face remains close to the ground to analyze all the methods the medics use to unhook them: they splint your legs against planks, numb each knee with a balm that makes you feel you are flying through stone. Now you crouch ready to doubt, blinking because it is your body’s to blink. You smile, invincibly obscured. From any closer I couldn’t take you whole so you imagine your hands luring my knees into both sides of your mouth and open your smile into a needy room — molded behind your teeth, a person of pity held down in thick liquid shame. Because you were born to be happy you would skin and uncap the knee of a good giant to make yourself a helmet that could guard you from under the brain, but you cannot get up off those knees.

The bear stopped dancing & unscrewed his head. He held it upside-down in the dusk. She reached into her pouch for a copper piece, but instead pulled out the silvery piece she’d been saving for some special occasion. A limited issue, stamped on one side with a profile of the prince; on the other side a water wheel did not spin. It glowed in her hand. Her hand grew heavy with it, & the salts, & the bittersome oils of her hand. Was this the occasion? The others were there with their fists in their pouches & the weary bear held out his head as if it were an offering or an object lesson. It was neither. It was ripped, with russet handfuls of animals’ hair pasted on & a secret eye slit recessed in its open maw. The wild old man in the bear suit parted his lips & out came a snatch of extinct birdsong. The musicians clapped. He’d learned it as a boy growing up in the mist-proud interior where he would call & call until the violet males in a frenzy swooped into his breathtaking nets.

There is nothing more innocent than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil, neither of us knowing what it will become in the abundance of the planet. It makes a living only by remaining still in its niche. One day it may struggle out of its tender pearl of blind skin with a wing or with vision leaving behind the transparent. I cover it again, keep laboring, hands in earth, myself a singular body. Watching things grow, wondering how a cut blade of grass knows how to turn sharp again at the end. This same growing must be myself, not aware yet of what I will become in my own fullness inside this simple flesh.