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He lifted invisible horses
One fever-burnt son kept hallucinating
In bed beside him;
Picked them up and carried them downstairs and out the door
To soothe the boy.
He had the strength for that, 
My father's father did.

     Born by some unknown river
     In the zero lands of Lithuania,
     Brought to America an immigrant child
     To grow up in a Pennsylvania coal town,
     He fled, a refugee at 13, from those gravelike mines
     To run down south to shelter in the Army,
     Where he learned to build and fly
     Those first open-cockpit planes,
     Yo plunge unshielded through the open blue.

Everything he knew he taught himself.
Little time in any schoolhouse for him.
Yet he steeped himself in the thoughts of the mighty;
Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare - all their company
Stood on his shelves and held converse with him.
He believed in the examined life, and did so with the best at the game;
When he saw the same need in his frail grandson
He applied the kind spurs to drive that thirst.

He lived an unplanned example of word and deed,
An unimagined shaper of lives.
He gave me the bittersweet thirst that cannot be slaked, yet always pleases
Perhaps as well, in time, the strength
To carry my own invisible horses
Down the stairs, and out the door.

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