I<\/b>
\n <\/p>\n
My father laid-out flat on the mortician\u2019s slab
\n Looks purple and peaceless. He\u2019s buried
\n To the chin in starchy sheets. A small frown
\n Is stitched into the middle of his brow,
\n And his eyeballs are contoured roundly on each
\n Eyelid. The floor crunches under our restless feet,
\n As if the ground is eating, as if it\u2019s chomping
\n Bones. A thin window high above gives to tons
\n Of cracked concrete. And there, in a fertile plot,
\n A crowd of flowers that have vermillion flecks
\n Stand on slender stalks, with broken necks.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Viewing him later in his cherry coffin,
\nWhorled with involuted knots and bird-eye dots,
\nHis moon-colored hair hangs frozen and waved;
\nTwo vertical grooves bracket the parted lips.
\nHe\u2019s gaunt and shrunken, a shrunken man, waxy
\nNow and fully fleshed. He\u2019s beyond empty,
\nThe case of a huge spirit gone cold.
\n\u201cIt doesn\u2019t look like him,\u201d the widow says, transfixed.
\nI agree: the rouged-up cheeks, the claret-stained lips,
\nThe evangelist\u2019s hair, and a piece of tongue
\nJust glimpsed, the spongy texture of raw lung.
\n<\/p>\n
So much changed from the year before
\nIn the lilac-scented spring following
\nThat brutal winter, when everything was crystal
\nGardens and suddenly lifeless upon the ground:
\nA bloody climax to a bloody life,
\nThe eldest son dead\u2014dead by his own hand.
\nMy father crawled to his bed then
\nAnd like a fallen tree lay himself down
\nAnd waited to die. He said he carried
\nA sadness too terrible to bear or beat.
\nThe planet wobbled beneath my feet.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Flowers and incense. He moves to my mind now
\nIn context of these. A masculine man,
\nSo vital and lithe, that is how I remember
\nHim. I remember my father in his
\nFaded jean-jacket, with his military
\nPosture that the famous General
\nOnce complimented him on. My father
\nKissing my mother. My lean-hipped father standing
\nAlone beside the sea, watercolor-green eyes\u2014
\nHunter\u2019s eyes\u2014thin as saber slashes;
\nBig knuckles, bony wrists, hair the hue of ashes.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
But overnight his face went slack, the flesh
\nAbout the bones, a padding, melting
\nLike candle wax. Both temples grew indrawn, clustered
\nWith greenish veins. He breathed for a while through
\nA snaky tube\u2014fat, ecru, quickly rejected\u2014
\nHis eyes wilting like grapes inside his massive gourd;
\nThe eczema-encrusted hands moved lobster-like
\nUpon the sheets. A gothic silence locked him up,
\nAs if he watched weird images flickering
\nAcross the bone concavity of his skull,
\nSomething horrible with, by turns, something dull.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Late that summer, in the denouement of
\nThe August storms, we watched his Sweet William,
\nPlanted the spring before, rock back and forth beneath
\nHis windowpane. They stood on slenderness,
\nAll fresh and fair, like the summer, like him, beautiful
\nAnd dying. They were his favorite flowers,
\nI believe, those fume-packed lovelies quilled deeply
\nWith red. The blankets, meanwhile, stirred not
\nAt all with the rise and fall of his tiny breath.
\nAnd each night the rain came down in a garish flood.
\nThe Sweet William looked spoked with blood.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
It was in this watery gloom beyond his room
\nThat was sunk so far from light, that he faded away.
\nRain that night came slow at first, with a sound like
\nThe whisper of wind in the grass. Street lamps hung
\nLike lunar globes caught in suspended flight.
\nSoftly you slept, softly you died. I thought for some
\nReason then how much you hated your name\u2014Firman\u2014
\nHow authoring your first child you said:
\n\u201cName him William, call him Bill.\u201d Simplify, of course.
\nOf course. Your sharp mind knew no other way.
\nI hope you found closure, that grainy day.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
II<\/b>
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Black-eyed Bill, William Harvey, RIP, Bill
\nWith his storied IQ. About him I recall
\nEverything: his long wild hair, his tumbling
\nGait, the calm about the eyes\u2014something strange there,
\nNone of us ever knew for sure what\u2014a smile
\nSo soft, so rare; wormy veins, azure and long;
\nThin wrists, strong; how he used to eat his eggs blackened
\nWith pepper and spice; calloused fingers; smart at math,
\nA fierce impatient brain that never forgot;
\nAll-pupil eyes that rolled like eightballs
\nInside his stormy skull. This and more I recall.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Often I\u2019d watch him\u2014did he know?\u2014standing
\nAt his window, cooling his forehead against the glass
\nAnd staring down at the breakneck rocks below.
\nThis was right after he\u2019d dropped out of high school
\nAnd was working in the mines. Knifey light slanted
\nDown outside onto the endless fields of snow.
\nBill in his undershirt and black slacks, flat-stomached
\nAnd lean. Often he\u2019d be reading some German
\nPhilosopher or the Gospel of John, which he,
\nAn atheist, always thought profound.
\n(He loved chapter seven with its Gnostic sound.)
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
I like to remember this now,
\nBill reading philosophy in his room.
\nI like to remember how he\u2019d pause
\nMid-sentence and stare up at the ceiling
\nWith a frown — as if trying to recall
\nSomething similar he\u2019d once read — and of course
\nThat frown, that frown. You thought so much, brother,
\nIt was as if your brain would explode.
\nAnd what were you always thinking about?
\nI wondered then; I wonder now. Did you,
\nAs it seemed, really know things nobody else knew?
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
There was all this, yes, and other things as well.
\nThe nights as a child that I woke and went
\nTo you (eschatological terror was my cross
\nTo bear). Over icy kitchen floors where the big square
\nAppliances loomed ominous, mute, and into
\nThe predawn dark so pure and absolute that for
\nA moment the entire universe seemed struck
\nDumb. Belted vaults above, glowing fields below,
\nStar-heavy skies, infundibular and vast, which
\nyou watched as if secrets prowled out there,
\nThough nothing stirred; only meteors slipping everywhere.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Always I found you, cross-legged on your leprous
\nCouch. A strange vigil you kept there in the arrant
\nDark, smoking Camel straights and sipping your
\nSour German beer. Brother, you never seemed
\nTo sleep; it was as if it didn\u2019t apply. Your
\nLong hair hung lank about your face \u2013 laced
\nAlready with skeins of gray \u2013 the foam of your beer
\nFlashing like suds in the night, your cigarette
\nA hot-pink eye where your mouth would be,
\nShins chalk-white, like a sylvan dream.
\nAnd the stars outside pulsed with a synecdochic gleam.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Never once unkind to me burrowing into
\nYour pit (while one of your hands still judiciously
\nSmoked), though you spoke not at all. Your caved face
\nSimply emerged, faded with each pull from your smoke:
\nA jack-o-lantern in the room. Sometimes, frankly,
\nI still smell that tobacco, mixed with the flannel
\nOf your shirt, oil and musk, and the odor
\nOf the mine where you worked (and worked); gas from
\nThe mongrel bike you built and loved. I still sometimes
\nSee your wet cow eyes shining like jewels in the hall.
\nBut your warmth \u2013 this more than all I chiefly recall.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Not long ago, in the innocuous bar,
\nAn acquaintance of yours said you played Russian
\nRoulette every night. \u201cOne game before bed,\u201d
\nHe said, tilting his glass in the mahogany light.
\n\u201cDidn\u2019t you know? Also, he never smoked Camel
\nUnfiltereds without lighting up the label end first.
\nThat way, he said, when you\u2019re robbing banks they won\u2019t know
\nWhat brand you smoke. Born to lose, that guy. A smart
\nMotherfucker though. Cool as shit.\u201d Above us,
\nA painted lady with a dimpled rear
\nStretches lewdly. I stare into my amber beer.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
So was it that? And why? That\u2019s what we all wished
\nTo know. You were in your prime then, thirty-four,
\nSo serious and sedate. You\u2019d grown very thin \u2013
\nEveryone spoke of this, and of how hard you worked.
\nIt was a Rocky Mountain winter night,
\nThe air outside standing cold and brittle
\nAs the little claws of ice which now, as I write,
\nCrawl up my windowpane, and you shot yourself
\nIn the back of the throat, indeed one bullet
\nIn your gun … Outside, the gorgeous snowflakes hurled
\nDown, hushing, hushing the entire world.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
III<\/b>
\n<\/br><\/p>\n
Now outdoors, same day after the funeral train,
\nUnder a broken sky, spates of rain,
\nAnd after staring into the clean-sliced pit,
\nWhich at last has my father in it,
\nWhy am I not at all surprised to find
\nThe one image in my mind: his lined
\nBrow, the questioning glare now stitched forever there.
\nI\u2019m in the same garden I watched him stare
\nAcross for days after Bill\u2019s death, from his desk
\nScanning this scene that\u2019s so picturesque.
\nThe desk is still there, split with its fibrous gash;
\nHis worn books whereon his half-moon glasses flash.
\nThrough the door, I once heard him say: \u201cLumbering Bill\u201d
\n(His voice soft and unbelievably real)
\n\u201cIs gone.\u201d Now so are you. But I? I am not dead.
\nAround me, Sweet William are disgorging red.
\n<\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I My father laid-out flat on the mortician\u2019s slab Looks purple and peaceless. He\u2019s buried To the chin in starchy sheets. A small frown Is stitched into the middle of his brow, And his eyeballs are contoured roundly on each Eyelid. The floor crunches under our restless feet, As if the ground is eating, as … <\/p>\n