From Still
Upon Finding a Letter Written By My Father,
Age 14, From Camp Chewonki, Maine, 1949
It isn’t difficult to see you there:
the cabin empty, rows of regular names
notched into ancient pine, a few beams
of afternoon sifting the dusty air
above your parted hair & half-moon lids,
your fingers choking the sweat-slick nub of pencil,
digging your way from word to word, while all
the other boys hoot up the summer woods,
their voices echoing across the pond
& playing fields, the rim of hills, & farther,
mountains rolling down to dusk & weather
like a dark armada burning; still your hand
kept to its task, till slowly what it gave
was this: the image of a solitude
you were too young to name, these words I read
now hard as diamonds, dark as any love.
House
House of the heavy door
House of the bronze claw cool to the touch
House where twilight pools in cut glass
& polished wood, where dark mythologies lie coiled & still
House of stillness but for the trickle of water
over copper leaves
House where a dream of lost empires
shimmers in the gloom, smelling faintly of salt
House of hanging plants & embroideries of plants,
of priapic fungi, swollen fruit, flowers & herbs, imaginary
lives lived out in a tropical mind
House of porcelain-tusked elephants poised
on a side table’s beveled palm
House of high-backed chairs & low chairs,
footstools & plush couches crouching
& empty, lazily alert as lions
House where lacquered silences are hung, reflecting
a hidden source of dawn
House of the grizzled portrait
House of puppets sleeping open-eyed in their boxes
House where a woman still appears
in her dressing gown, her hair
pinned back tight from translucent temples,
her real hair, grey & stiff as smoke hanging in the woods
House of the keen-eyed petite woman
& in the background a man, her husband
stooped & dignified as a mountain,
hard of hearing, moving to greet me
House I keep coming back to, trying
to find them, wanting to say something
House where I have to say something
or hear something said, to listen
to the clock’s distinct faint chiming echo
through those more expansive hearts,
those darker, blood-filled, unfashionable hearts
House of shadows where I
keep reaching for the wrapped gifts,
for the thin blue hand
A Game of Catch
After the meal, the den-warm faces
drowsing in the lamplit velvet arms
of couches, the kitchen sounds a soft
staccato, TV muted to a pantomime
of something dreamed almost remembered,
Grandaddy lying down again,
dying of cancer in the back bedroom
where I’ve never been but will be,
I slip out through the sliding glass doors
to the slate-paved patio where leaves
still twirl like mottled costume feathers
from the dark attics of the live oaks,
each trunk banistered with a vine
of braided steel, the highest branches
black against the vaulted sky,
the sky leached cobalt-blue to rose
by late November distance, where
I see him now, far from the house’s glow,
brother to my mother, framed
by the same hand working me still
through bones’ ache & foundry
to that congruence, treading gloom
& roll, sure-footed of the course,
one of the Charlotte cousins with him,
moving apart, away, but keeping
a measure local to themselves,
shifting, compensating in it,
a dialogue of sleeves, white signals
coded, sent, decoded as he
hooks from the momentary stream,
& cradles, bears it a few jogged steps
over lighter rough & onto the blue
swell of fairway, twisting in his run
to send it out strongly into darkness
toward the waiting arms I now no longer
see but hear like wings the sent thing arc
into that waiting, sing snug home,
their moving now gone ghost against
the night of trees, a hint, a dream
of boots in wet grass, creak of fingers
gripping the leather’s rough & give,
the surge & snap of strength delivered,
the light, listening breath––