Now that I’m sick & have
all this time to contemplate
the meaning of the universe,
Father said, I understand why
I never did it before. Nothing
looks good from a prone position.
You have to walk around to appreciate
things. Once I get better I don’t
intend to get sick for a while. But
if I do I hope I get one of those diseases
you can walk around with.
I wanted to walk outside and praise the stars,
But David, my baby son, coughed and coughed.
His comfort was more important than the stars
So I comforted and kissed him in his dark
Bedroom, but my comfort was not enough.
His mother was more important than the stars
So he cried for her breast and milk. It’s hard
For fathers to compete with mothers’ love.
In the dark, mothers illuminate like the stars!
Dull and jealous, I was the smallest part
Of the whole. I know this is stupid stuff
But I felt less important than the farthest star
As my wife fed my son in the hungry dark.
How can a father resent his son and his son’s love?
Was my comfort more important than the stars?
A selfish father, I wanted to pull apart
My comfortable wife and son. Forgive me, Rough
God, because I walked outside and praised the stars,
And thought I was more important than the stars.
The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
What I’m looking for
is an unmarked door
we’ll walk through
and there: whatever
we’d wished for
beyond the door.
What I’m looking for
is a golden bowl
carefully repaired
a complete world sealed
along cracked lines.
What I’m looking for
may not be there.
What you’re looking for
may or may not
be me. I’m listening for
the return of that sound
I heard in the woods
just now, that silvery sound
that seemed to call
not only to me.
may favor obscure brainy aptitudes in you
and a love of the past so blind you would
venture, always securing permission,
into the back library stacks, without food
or water because you have a mission:
to find yourself, in the regulated light,
holding a volume in your hands as you
yourself might like to be held. Mostly your life
will be voices and images. Information. You
may go a long way alone, and travel much
to open a book to renew your touch.
You think I like to stand all day, all night,
all any kind of light, to be subject only
to wind? You are right. If seasons undo
me, you are my season. And you are the light
making off with its reflection as my stainless
steel fins spin.
On lawns, on lawns we stand,
we windmills make a statement. We turn air,
churn air, turning always on waiting for your
season. There is no lover more lover than the air.
You care, you care as you twist my arms
round, till my songs become popsicle
and I wing out radiants of light all across
suburban lawns. You are right, the churning
is for you, for you are right, no one but you
I spin for all night, all day, restless for your
sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses,
because I so like how you lay above me,
how I hovered beneath you, and we learned
some other way to say: There you are.
You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill
the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until
all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy.
My daughter’s hands
enter their rubber gloves,
remove an instrument
from its plastic case.
I whisper from one hundred miles
away: Remember Bach’s sonata—
the way you learned to curve
your fingers to lift the beauty
from the keys? Remember me
curled inside the dark
red chair behind you?
Have I told you
how what your hands were doing
moved the delicate bones
inside my ears? Tell me,
when you learn, how those tiny bones
are capable of such a miracle,
how their movement reached far
into my heart’s tight chambers;
how today my mind’s eye
finds you, though you have entered
another city, where your hands
tremble a bit as you cut
into the cadaver’s back,
as they trembled at recitals
when you were small,
till they found their way inside
the music, and the music gathered
all around them, and waited
for the touching.
