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.