To Father On Your Suicide--1960
You think not of life, but of the moon:
still and white. August wind chimes
like sweet bones sound a tune
of twenty-three; the somber age
when you will die
and summer turns another page.
Each capsule is a sparrow
downed with whiskey, all thought
is instinct now,
words are deep within the marrow.
So focused you notice neither light
nor heat, the feel of grass
beneath the sill
where you are lying in the night.
Come morning Granny will read a tale
to us of Sneetches
and Bartholomew's hats.
But by morning you are a failed
hatchling, having sputtered
on the shell of birth,
an unseen life
before the rhymes are ever uttered.
Half your body is already dead,
polio a miasma having seeped
into the sticky
southern air of your rheumatic bed.
The westward trip has brought the fray
of legal separation
and restraint.
To sanctuary has come the day
when your sons will not come back.
California did not hold
the remedy of
tranquility you lack.
Even golden boys with scholarships
to lift them up and
out of poverty,
the flower at their fingertips,
meet other fates. The world in never fair.
Your body is a prison,
soul and spirit stretched
upon the rack of your despair.
The choice has been both clear and bright;
as the other world
slips into ether.
This medicine has put you right.
You don't forget though senses dull;
each balmy echo is a wrinkle
in the brain packed tightly
in the vessel of your skull.
The house is to your back like a mother
urging wings of flight.
You are not afraid
to fall now courage is your brother.
You are approaching simple truth.
The deed is done, you think,
and I can triumph
for the first time since my youth.
“Sunrise, float me as a feather.
I feel the white dove of my being.
Be the place of my desire
and all that rises will come together.”
You hoist and lose the tether
of the heart, now
bound for daylight
when all that rises will come together.
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