Frank

He lifted invisible horses That 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 And ran down south to shelter in the Army, Where he learned to build and fly Those first open-cockpit planes, And plunge unsheilded through the open blue. Everything he knew he taught himself. Little time was spent by him in the schoolhouse. Yet he steeped himself in the thoughts of the mighty; Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare and 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, And when he saw the same need in his frail grandson He applied the kind spurs that 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 And maybe as well, in time, the strength To carry my own invisible horses Down the stairs, and out the door.