“Recovery” and Other Poems

Forgive

“In old age / the mind / casts off / rebelliously / an eagle / from its crag.”
—William Carlos Williams

There must be something else to this life
Other than death. I don’t care if that’s an obvious
Supposition, desire, fallacy, fantasy, love—
As you will, or will not, as far as the nearness of ending is in conclusion,
Forming its imago philosophical candlelight
With halos surrounding the flames. To feel the stroke
Of time, rage of lateral light, brain stunned in mid
Falling flight, back, back, into the gray of ice blue eyes
That lose their look to see, my father falling
Away from himself, from me, both weightless as a moment
In physical space. I reach out to catch his fall,
Tempers reduced, replaced by consciousness, gravity;
You never understand it until you’re whirling through it
Like a soldier fallen on the field.
The mind catches everything and plays it back
Incessantly, every ray of truth like a mirror takes in everything,
Each memory silent as glass.
It was the first time I asked God for you to be “just drunk,”
Without balance or remembering things past,
In search of drunk time, lost like your glass every hour
In every missed corner, cursing at the television, the weather,
Waiting for Frank Strait on the radio—
“Now that son-of-a-bitch can tell the weather…”
I picked you up as so many times before.
When you went out in the hurricane, trees falling around you,
Arrows of branches flying past, glass in hand,
Lear-like howling at the wind as an evergreen
Missed the shine of your head by a foot.
You pushed and fought your way through the dark
And the flood of water deepening with every step.
Somehow you made it to the lightless porch,
Found the right door and climbed exhausted to the top of the stairs
Like Hillary reaching the summit of Everest.
Twigs, leaves, grass and pine needles stuck to your face
And clothing, your shoes drenched, dirty mud sponges.
The winds blew their "cataracts and hurricanoes."
Mom sat in her room reading by hurricane lamp;
She wanted no part in the drink and surge, the sulfurous
Spray and uprooted trees split at the roots.
Can you remember the heatless nights of candlelight and flashlights
With batteries that died after three days? And boiling water
To shower? Turning on the gas stove for 10 minutes
To let the heat radiate as you put on your old Brooks Brothers
Storm coat with fake fur to button down for another
Bleak November night? I’d wake up shivering and check on you,
Pale blue skin, cold, I wasn’t going to let you drift off
In the freeze of sleep. I told you someday I’d write a book and call it
“10 Days in the Dark with the Old Man.”
Not even a superstorm could make you spill your drink
Or break your will. And here we are, four years later.
The neighbors call you a “cat whisperer,” a decoder
Of feline mystery, a man in perpetual motion, a paradox of "silence,
Exile, and cunning," out of the cradle endlessly talking,
And thinking, sadness, irony, on a Journey to the End of the Night.
After 88 years your hurricane turned inward, raged too hard.
And I’m the son of a hurricane now left to reassemble
Storms of stray winds while you dream supine
In a hospital bed plugged in, “wired” to a machine
That measures the digital beat of your heart,
There is no abstraction; the word isolated
From any distraction or elements diluted.
The ineffable and the absent before us,
This is a school of teacherless lessons: inexplicable,
Indefinable. We’ve come to it on our own without knowledge.
You, who’ve fought the lightning stroke of time
With speech in a gray storm of letters and clenched teeth,
Fighting to conjure a single word for release: “forgive.”
I hear it clear as oxygen rising and falling, “forgive,”
Clearer than standing out of my own body of blood
And bones, flesh whose sole meaning is to compose
A kingdom of forgiveness in the music that only a father can offer
His son, and repeat to him, “forgive,” as all that can be done
In this unanswerable interplay of body and imagination,
In this vocabulary stunned, in this bedside where I read
To you, aware, unaware, of every drop and pulse of the clock.
There is something else than this, the curious mind’s
Rebellious intelligence, to hold doubt and certainty at the same time
As words echo across their meanings, more like a sense
Of seeming than any transcendental “ah-hah”—we forgive
Ourselves first and let love which is a textured feeling
Like a father to his son whose words give him meaning—forgive,
The plainest sense of things, absolute, to live,
In the forest of sleep and dreams however brief,
Simple as a black beetle crossing a dark green leaf.